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OS does not boot, when second HDD is removed

A

Ares202

Senior member
I recently installed a 1TB Samsung spinpoint F1 drive, and installed windows vista and a data partition on the HDD but ive encountered an issue, once i remove my older 320gb Western Digital drive Vista will not boot and i get the message "system boot failure, insert system disk and press any key"

i want to get the drive working independently as i intended to move the 320gb drive to another system, does anyone how to fix this issue?

Thanks for your Time
 
I take it the 320GB HD is the active one, and it contains the bootloader info.
You should have unplugged the 320 first, and then installed the OS, or mirror the 320 onto the F1.
 
I used EasyBCD to help make a dual-boot system, I think it has the tools you need including writing and modifying boot info.
 
Use a Windows disc and repair install? Somewhere in there I think is the option to recreate the bootloader files.
 
Originally posted by: Astrallite
Hmmm...changing the boot order *should* boot directly from that disk.
Click to expand...

Nope.
The OS may be installed to one drive, but the boot.ini etc were on a different drive (the one he removed), so there is no longer any boot information to tell the computer there is an OS on the other drive.
I had the same issue happen myself. It's because the boot.ini stuff doesn't have to reside on the same drive as the OS does (for obvious reasons, you could have multiple OS's on multiple drives).
 
the problem is that windows is stupid. If your "first boot drive" (as set in bios) is drive A, and you install windows to drive B, it will put the boot info ONLY on drive A pointing to drive B (instead of putting a copy on A pointing to B and a copy on B pointing to itself). So if you remove that drive the boot info is gone.
I would say the easiest solution is to install your own bootloader, like grub, on drive B. or you can just use windows disk to "Fix" the install (might have to reinstall windows, not sure how exactly this will proceed).
Personally i have never managed to find out how to do that. I just did a quick reinstall and have never made the mistake of having more than just the OS drive plugged in when installing windows.
 
it happened to me b4, what i did was let my os drive connected only, and use windows dvd to boot up and "repair", restart the computer and loaded to windows, made the only drive which was conndcted "active" in "manage disks"

i learned my lesson so everytime i install windows (especially vista) i connect 1 drive only
 
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