Windows 7 won't boot after removing secondary drive

[jwhite85]

Hi, When I installed windows 7 I had 2 hard drives hooked up, a SATA drive "C:" and an IDE "D:". I installed windows to the SATA drive and now want to remove the IDE but when I do I get a message that says "reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press any key." While researching this I have seen that windows will sometimes put some data on the secondary drive while installing and I should have pulled it before installing windows. Is this what happened to me and if so is there any way I can fix it without doing a "repair install" from the windows dvd? I've tried running the startup repair from the install disk and it didn't work. Windows XP was installed on the IDE drive when I installed windows 7 the to SATA drive. Thanks.

 

[richnrockville]

Welcome Jwhite to the forums. One of your problems is that the install for windows 7 found your installed XP installation and made some changes in the boot record. Can we assume that you used to boot from the IDE drive with windows XP?

If So, then your probably out of luck as the system seems to think that your boot drive is really D as the boot record contains some information for the ntloader for windows 7.

I would bet that you won't be able to boot your XP installalation from your D drive if you remove your SATA drive from your machine.

I always recommend removing the cables from any other disk when doing an install.

Less aggrivation would be to remove the D drive and then boot your windows 7 dvd and do a format and install of windows 7.

Some of your data from the old D drive is probably still available once you have successfully installed Windows 7 on your Sata drive.

YMMV
Rich

 

[TVeblen]

Hello Jwhite85. Welcome to the Forum.

Yes, you have correctly diagnosed what happened to cause the problem.

It is necessary to run Startup Repair 3 times to correct the missing MBR issue. Did you do that already?

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/681-startup-repair.html?ltr=S

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/105541-startup-repair-run-3-separate-times.html

EDIT: And of course, be sure only the SATA drive is connected when running startup repair.

 

[jwhite85]

thanks for the reply's. came across a utility called EasyBCD while searching forums. after running it I was able to remove the D drive and boot to 7 with no problems.

 

[TVeblen]

Congrats.
I hear lots of good things about EasyBCD here. One day I hope to have the opportunity to use it.

Or do I?