Wont boot after changing boot order

gjwebber · 23 Nov 2009 at 09:49

Hi,

Firstly i'll explain my current setup:

2x HDD - 1 IDE and 1 SATA
1x DVD RW

I have WinXP installed on the IDE hard drive. I bought a new SATA hard drive and installed Windows 7 on it. Everything works fine so far.

I'm now going to wipe the IDE hdd and use it for storage. The problem here is that it's set as the first boot device in the BIOS. When i change the SATA to the first boot device (and IDE 2nd) it won't boot, so i'm thinking if i format it Win7 i'm going to have problems as well.

How can i fix this?

Thanks,
Gareth

rpstewart · 23 Nov 2009 at 10:10

I'm guessing that you had both HDDs connected when you installed 7. From the sound of it the boot files are on the IDE drive since it had the lowest drive ID at the time of install, the rest of the Win7 installation is on the SATA drive.

You've got a couple of options - 1) reinstall 7 with only the SATA drive connected or 2) do some jiggery pokery with the recovery console and the fixboot command to get the boot files onto the SATA drive.

gjwebber · 23 Nov 2009 at 15:31

Thanks for the info, I'll have a go when i get home.

It's a pain, my ISP hasn't activated my line yet so can't get back online and report my findings till tomorrow!

PaulyD · 23 Nov 2009 at 16:05

Windows 7 did the exact same for me, installs the boot loader to a different drive. Have a Raid0 array and a single 500gb drive, it puts boot files on the single 500gb and then installs the windows files on the Raid.

Annoying but not critical, just left me baffled a bit when setting up my bios!

InQ · 24 Nov 2009 at 07:47

Boot from the W7 DVD and let the recovery automatically find and repair the problem. You might have to go through the process a couple of times, it did work for me though.

gjwebber · 26 Nov 2009 at 08:09

I put the win7 disk in but it was totally different to XP. I assume XP is what has the fixboot command?

I tried the repair thing mentioned above, with all other disks disconnected. It found the problem (same one like 3 times in a row), but never actually fixed it!

I just formatted as it was a pretty new install, and that created the extra partition that was needed, so it's all working fine again now.