Attempting to remove a hard drive, OS not permitting

[Ross Stuart]

Hi! I am a somewhat knowledgeable PC user (custom built and maintained my PC for the last seven or so years) and I am in need of some assistance.

Awhile back, I tried out Windows 7 RC. When I did so, I installed it on a 1TB hard drive (SATA) as a dual boot with my existing installation of Windows XP on a 160GB HD (PATA). Later, I got a student deal on Windows 7 Professional and overwrote the existing RC installation.

I now wish to remove the hard drive with the Windows XP install, put it into a PC I have assembled out of spare parts, and give it a fresh install of Windows XP. However, when I attempted to do so, I got the message "NTLDR is missing".

According to a friend, the boot information of my PC is in the XP installation. So my question is, how do I get my system to use the 7 installation? Specifically, is it possible to do so without reinstalling Windows 7 from scratch? I'd prefer not to rebuild my system again, though I suppose in a lot of ways it is overdue.

Thanks for your time and advice!

MSI 785GT-E63 Mainboard
AMD X4 640 Processor
Antec 300 Case
NVidia GeForce 465
Hitachi 1TB Hard Drive SATA
160 GB Hard Drive PATA, maker unknown
Kingston 4X1GB DDR2 RAM

 

[bigi]

Use "offline" disk partitioning tool or dban.

Remove all partitions and/or erase the drive.

BTW, Win7 installation should deal with it easily. Select drive, remove current partition(s) and install.

 

[FishAk]

This is a common problem when multiple disks are connected during W7's installation- W7 scatters required files all over the place.

I saw a way to fix it, but I don't remember where. If I remember right, it was basically; move the W7 partition over a little, clone the System partition from the other drive over to the space you made in front of the W7 partition, then do a repair install without the other disk connected. You should be able to google the procedure simple enough.

 

[razel]

Just to be clear: Win 7 is on the SATA 1TB Win7, XP is on the PATA. Dual boots fine. You took the XP PATA drive onto another system and then NTLDR? It just has trouble booting. Sounds like you'll need to mark that partition as active and/or rewrite the MBR on the PATA disk.

You will need to get to a WinXP command line on that XP machine off a bootable CD. The command is something along the line of fixboot and fixmbr. You can google it easily. Here it is referenced in #6 and #7. You just need to ensure that the partition is bootable or active and then rebuild the XP boot process and files, both of which is fixable off the WinXP CD through programs run from the command line (recovery console).

 

[boochi]

Download EasyBCD and install. Go to BCD Deployment tab in EasyBCD, choose the partition with the Windows 7 installation under "Create Bootable External Media" and click "Install BCD". Shutdown, remove XP drive, set boot priority in bios and restart. Hope that works for you.
http://neosmart.net/download.php?id=1

 

[Ross Stuart]

From what it sounds like, I guess I should just start over and rebuild my system.

Thank you everyone for you advice!

 

[Echo147]

Run a repair from 7's install disc at least, will probably find the installation and patch up the boot files.

 

[Voo]

This is a common problem when multiple disks are connected during W7's installation- W7 scatters required files all over the place.

It doesn't scatter them all over the place it has just added Win7's bootloader entry to the already existing one - not a bad thing to do (after all you prefer having access to your XP install after installing 7 right?) per se.

The simplest solution is to just remove the HDD, start the PC and run /fixmbr - that should write a new bootloader..

 

[Nothinman]

This is a common problem when multiple disks are connected during W7's installation- W7 scatters required files all over the place.

I saw a way to fix it, but I don't remember where. If I remember right, it was basically; move the W7 partition over a little, clone the System partition from the other drive over to the space you made in front of the W7 partition, then do a repair install without the other disk connected. You should be able to google the procedure simple enough.

It doesn't scatter things all over the place, it just places the boot files on the drive the BIOS sees as drive 0 which is normal for any OS that wants to actually boot after installation.