SSD suddenly not bootable?

[CurseTheSky]

My boss's computer has three hard drives - a 120GB G.Skill SSD (primary), a 500GB Western Digital HDD (old OS drive), and a 74GB Raptor (spare).

When I installed the SSD, he left the 500GB in with the OS and files intact, just in case he couldn't get around to moving everything over to the SSD immediately, so he had something to fall back on. He then proceeded to install the same copy of Windows 7 on the SSD, and planned to format the 500GB after and use it for storage.

Recently, he was working on manually moving / deleting files off of the 500GB, and mentioned that he deleted pagefile.sys (don't ask me why). Now, with just the SSD attached and no other hard drives present, the computer won't boot - it simply asks for a valid OS disk (all Windows / user files still appear to be on the SSD though). On the other hand, when I run just the 500GB drive, it gives me a choice to boot two "different" copies of Windows 7, one which starts up fine, and one that errors when I try to boot into it. Odd.

To make a long story short, how can I make the SSD bootable again without formatting it and starting over from scratch? Should I try inserting the Windows 7 DVD and doing a repair? I want to keep all of the user files (documents, etc.) on the SSD intact.

Thanks. 🙂

 

[tweakboy]

You can try a repair install that wont mess up anything. Or you can make the boot selection default to the one that boots. gl

 

[jackofalltrades]

It sounds like you installed the ssd with the 500 gig hard drive attached which is a no no since it would associate files from the old OS to the new one You should unhook the old disk repair the ssd and then hook up the 500 gig if I'm right it should rin fine with out anymore issues with deleting files from the 500 gig drive.

 

[tweakboy]

Yes do what jackofall said. gl