Unable to boot Corsair F60 by default

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Hi all

I installed Windows 7 on my new Corsair F60 last night (well at 1am this morning since I initially tried to install from a USB stick since I thought it would be faster, but it wasn't so I had to burn Windows to a DVD and install that way), but now when I boot I can't just boot straight into the new Windows installation.

My config is:
MSI P35 Neo2
Drive mode set to AHCI
1 X WD 500GB with Windows XP
1 X WD 500GB with Windows 7
1 X Corsair F60 with Window 7

When I set the F60 as the 1st boot device it still presents me with a menu where I have to select which Windows 7 I want to load (the one on the WD or the one on the F60). If I remove all hard drives from the boot list and set to only boot from the F60, it tries to boot from the Windows XP drive and fails since that Windows isn't AHCI enabled.

Any ideas how I can get it to just boot straight into the F60? :confused:
I am thinking of swapping the cable to the XP drive to the F60 since maybe in AHCI mode boot priority doesn't work? :confused:
 
I tend to just keep my existing set up on my drives since I don't want to format them, hence I still have my Windows XP drive :D

There is no reason for me to format my WD Windows 7 drive, so I am just leaving it as it is in case I need to load it for some reason.

I will try and disconnect all drives except the Corsair, but I would really like to just leave everything connected so I can copy files around (like I still have my Steam games on the WD Windows 7 drive). Having a Windows 7 and Windows XP drive doesn't cause this problem, so I don't know if it's a multiple Windows 7 installs problem or a Corsair SSD problem.
 
Multiple Win7 installs :)

That's why I asked. Disconnect the WD Win 7 and the problem will go away and boot to the F60 without any problems :)

A solution to your Steam account would be to make a partition for it on the XP drive ?
 
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Ah that sucks, so you can't boot into a particular Windows 7 hard drive automatically if you have say 5 drives with Windows 7 on each? (you would see the OS selection screen every time with 5 Windows 7 options even if you set one of the drives to be boot device 1?) :(

That means I have to copy any files I want from the WD and then format it :(
 
See my edit above for a solution to your Steam worries. Keep the drive as a backup for a while before rushing in and formatting it. :)
 
Ok, something like this could have happened.

When you install windows, one partition on the drive will be marked as "Active" which indicates the drive is bootable and the "Active" partition should be looked in to find the boot loader.

When you installed XP, that drive would be marked as bootable.
When you installed W7 #1 it also set itself up as bootable.
When you installed W7 #2, the W7 #1 drive was still plugged in? Windows noticed this and instead of making your F60 bootable it added the boot info to your old drive.

Even if your F60 is marked as the primary drive it has no bootable partition so your PC checks the next one and finds the one on W7 #1.

You can check this by looking under Disk Management:
Right click the Computer icon -> manage -> Disk Management.

Are any of the partitions of your F60 listed as "Active"?
For that matter if you disconnect the old 2 drives do you get an error along the lines of "NTLDR missing, press any key to reboot" when booting?

RationalGaze said:
Ah that sucks, so you can't boot into a particular Windows 7 hard drive automatically if you have say 5 drives with Windows 7 on each? (you would see the OS selection screen every time with 5 Windows 7 options even if you set one of the drives to be boot device 1?)
If you disconnect all drives apart from the one you want to install to and don't reconnect them until you have installed windows it should work as you want.

If what I think has happened you can still set it to automatically boot into your new installation. The problem is the bootloader is on your old drive. If you ever yank it your new installation wont boot.
 
Ah thanks for the explanation, that sounds like what happened. I should have just disconnected all drives, but I didn't know something like this could happen :(

I'm at work now so I can't sort it out at the moment. I've already set up my new installation with Avast, firefox etc. so I might try unplugging all the drives and seeing if it will load straight into the Corsair and then plug the others back in and maybe from then on it will be the primary drive (no idea if this will work). I'll also try this program I found called EasyBCD which lets you modify the bootloader.
 
You probably don't need to fiddle around with EasyBCD. The old drives can happily keep their boot menus/loaders as long as there is one on the new drive.

I had a quick search and one solution presented is:

1) Unplug all drives except your F60 and make sure it is set as the boot drive
2) Run Startup Repair from the W7 DVD

Some people said it worked, some that it took several reboots/runs to work, and some said it didn't work.

The second post in this thread suggests Bootrec.exe if the Startup Repair doesn't work and links to the appropriate MS knowledge base article.

If all else fails a reinstall may be in order :(

You'd think MS would create a simple tool for a problem like this.
 
Ah great, thanks very much! I will try that tonight and post back the result. Appreciate you looking into it for me! Cheers!

EDIT: Thanks again for the help, I tried a few things on the link you gave me, like using bootrec.exe, but it didn't work so I just reinstalled Windows 7 with the other drives unplugged. Only took about 15mins start to finish :)

Unfortunately I still get the dual booting screen :P I can change the selection time to 0 seconds though, so it's no big deal. I should really format the other drive anyway.
 
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