Hard drive boot issue

peige · 9 May 2014 at 07:20

Strange one that I can't fix

Had a 80gig ssd hard drive on my windows 7 64 system as well as several other drives carrying data.
Time moves on, prices come down and I have brought a 220 gig ssd. Used partition manager to copy all the data from old to new, rebooted, all fine. Used windows own tools to extend the partion to full size. Still fine.

The twist is that I have 4 external drives, if these are switched on then the machine refuses to boot and gets stuck at verifying dmi pool data, if I switch them off then it boots fine (if I switch them off when its stuck it doesn't carry on)
Before I changed drives it would boot fine.

If I boot on windows dvd and try and repair (thinking perhaps repairing mbr might help) it doesn't see the operation system disk.

Help?!

Below is the drives (externals are switched off) as windows sees them. Should C be "Active" perhaps?

hd by peige10101, on Flickr

Grrrrr · 9 May 2014 at 11:43

On my motherboard i have 5 SATA ports but only 4 of them can be used at once. Could it be something like that?

bloodiedathame · 9 May 2014 at 12:23

I read that Windows writes data onto your other drives which it then reads at bootup, ie it's still looking for your old ssd when it sees your other drives. I'm not sure what the solution is. You could try unplugging the drives, running repair from your disk (as it will definitely see your ssd then) and going from there...

peige · 9 May 2014 at 13:40

It was a straight swap of drives and now resides on exactly the same sata cable so don't think its the first suggestion.

Could be to do with hunting for old drives, I will try disconnecting all the others and running the repair tool

peige · 9 May 2014 at 14:13

Thats cracked it!

Booted up with nothing else plugged in as suggested and the windows installation was found. Did a fixmbr thingy and shut down. Now when it boots all is well.

Thanks

bloodiedathame · 9 May 2014 at 14:38

Glad it worked! I'm not just a pretty face.