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Windows 7 booting off wrong drive?!?!?

S

speedy11131

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System Specs
Processor Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition
Motherboard Gigabyte GA-M68MT-SP2
Video Card(s) EVGA GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB
Storage Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB SSD, Western Digital Caviar Black 1.5TB
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Power Supply RP-550
Software Windows 7 Ultimate
Please move if this is in the wrong place.

I have two hard drives, a 1.5TB drive, and a 160GB drive. Windows is installed on the 1.5TB drive, as are all my files and programs. The 160GB drive has a bunch of old files, and apparently the bootmgr and boot folder. Nothing else is on the 160GB drive, other than media files etc.

If I remove the 160GB drive from the machine, windows refuses to boot, plug it back in, it works fine. The setup with two hard drives I have now is temporary, as the 160GB drive will go into another machine.

My question is, can someone give me a step by step on how to make windows force to boot off the 1.5TB drive, ignoring the 160GB drive in the boot process completely?
I don't know how to do this in Windows 7, on XP I would just run the /fixmbr command and its related ones.

Any help would be appreciated.

Note: I would really really rather not have to wipe and reinstall, I know it can be done without one as I've had this issue with XP before.
 
This is the right place.

Just an idea but you could pull the 160GB out then put your Windows 7 disc in and boot into recovery mode. Then rebuild the MBR. Here's a tutorial:
http://www.ehow.com/how_4836283_repair-mbr-windows.html
I want to mention that I've never tried the bootsect.exe tool they talk about in the tutorial.

Additionally you could try using EasyBCD to figure out where the hell the problem is. Chances are EasyBCD can fix your problem as well.
 
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It shouldn't be hard to get it working. I don't know about the bootsect tool, but I've always done it by just booting off the Win7 DVD, and telling it to fix startup problems. Usually I have to do this twice(occassionally 3 times) and then it boots without issue.
 
The problem seems to be more than just a boot stuff.

What does the 1.5 TB drive do when boot alone currently ? (spin sound, HDD activity LED, post screen, error messeage, weird blinking or bios waiting) , did you get it from another computer and just connected it onto this one ?, was it working before you put the 160 GB drive in ? , What's the POST info , is 1.5 TB even detected ?

You have to look into bios and tell me what bios you have , AWARD / AMI ?
 
RuskiSnajper said:
The problem seems to be more than just a boot stuff.

What does the 1.5 TB drive do when boot alone currently ? (spin sound, HDD activity LED, post screen, error messeage, weird blinking or bios waiting) , did you get it from another computer and just connected it onto this one ?, was it working before you put the 160 GB drive in ? , What's the POST info , is 1.5 TB even detected ?

You have to look into bios and tell me what bios you have , AWARD / AMI ?
Click to expand...

No, it is entirely a Windows boot issue. Windows is stupid when it installs, and often will write the boot manager to the wrong drive, so when you remove that drive it will fail to boot. I see it a lot.
 
maybe you simply can open disk management and mark drive as active
 
This is an issue when you install windows. You should only install windows 7 when the drive you want windows on is plugged in, and no others. Otherwise it'll install bootmgr on one of the other drives. :(
 
well that's the problem ...



it should be done with the repair , if theres a command to rewrite the whole boot manager again , i think it's bootsecs or bootmgr , just use both , but anyways , the data should be fine.

you need remove other drives , install win7 as usually would , but select advanced/custom (repair / maintenance) to open up the tools and there's the command prompt.

you need to get the commands for win7 , not all are the same to XP.
 
I used EasyBCD and just assigned a different boot drive, and then moved the bootmgr and the boot folder over to it, seems to work fine now. Thanks all.
 
EasyBCD is the way to go , i recall , it fixed a bug when i had always an selection with single OS entry shown up , it was caused by Vista bootmgr , though no any drives or Vista was installed, somehow it came to the Xp HDD.
 
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