Boot Drive issues Win 7

[jersiq]

Not sure how this happened but it did.

I have two drives 1) System and 2) media from my older install of XP.

I noticed that all my media was missing, and tried to look for it on the drive when I came across this issue. It appears that Win 7 is installed on a partition on my media drive.

I know, shame on me for not removing the drive during install, just being lazy.
When I use Partition Wizard Home I have the following:

Disk 2 (which is my media drive) as Active and Boot.

Disk 1 (which I'd like to be my boot drive) seems to have everything else. In other words, it looks like windows is only using my media drive for boot information and all the programs etc. are going onto disk 1. For some reason this is in two logical drives. One drive is 100MB and the other is the remainder of the volume for that disk.

Is there an easy way to get past this? I'd like to not wipe what's on the media drive unless I have to.

The BIOS recognizes both drives, but will not boot from Disk1

 

[RebateMonger]

You can get some information about this situation here:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SwitchingMyWindows7BootDiskFromDToCWithBCDBootRatherThanBCDEdit.aspx

Note that the terms are a bit backward. The "System" partition in Disk Management contains the boot (BCD) files and the "Boot" partition in Disk Management contains the system files (Windows). Confusing, huh?

Also note that, unless told otherwise, Windows will go down the disk order (0,1,...) and will attempt to boot from the first Active partition it finds on that list. If the first Active partiton contains boot files, it'll boot from that. If there's no boot files, it'll go to the next Active partition and look for boot files there. There can only be a single Active partition on each disk and there needn't be any Active partition on a "data-only" disk.

Also, for clarity, BCDEdit and BCDBoot are Windows utilities and EasyBCD is a third-party utility.

 

[jersiq]

Disregard below. It seems that EasyBCD was able to fix the problem when BCDBoot didn't work for me

Hmmmmmm.

I gave that a whack last night and it still failed. I'll label the drives by their size.

300G is my media drive
500G is my Windows drive

I did the BCDBoot command line as Admin and rebooted. Got into BIOS and set the 500G as the boot drive, and I get a missing bootmgr error.

I then opened the box and switched the SATA cabling so that the 500G was on the lowest numbered SATA on the motherboard. Still got bootmgr missing error.

Maybe I am looking at it wrong, here's some screencaps:

From Partition Wizard Home:

From Diskmgmt:

 

[RebateMonger]

Glad you got it fixed.