Strange Happenings When Removing Hard Drive

[trainspotting]

I am running Windows 7 Pro from a Western Digital Black Caviar 1 TB drive. I have another 1 TB Western Digital Black Caviar that I was using as a data drive. I moved all of my data off the drive such that it shows up as "empty" when you click on it in "my computer".

The strangeness comes when I remove this second drive and attempt to boot the PC. I get a black screen with an error code of oXC000000e "The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessable".

I made no other changes to the PC other than removing the second. When I put the second drive back in the PC boots normally!

 

[lxskllr]

The bootloader is on the second drive. Boot to the Win7 DVD. fixmbr with the second drive detached should fix it.

 

[trainspotting]

I disconnected the second drive. I booted from the system disk and open a command prompt. changed to c: and typed fixmbr. received the following message:
"fixmbr is not recognized as an internal or external command".

 

[lxskllr]

Try this...

bootrec.exe /fixmbr

 

[VirtualLarry]

This is truely bizarre behavior of the Win7 installer. It has a severe tendency to put the bootloader on a non-primary drive.

 

[trainspotting]

Tried the command suggested (bootrec.exe /fixmbr ) ; i did get a message " the operation completed successfuly" but when I rebooted I got the same error message as before. Not sure what to do now....

 

[lxskllr]

Sigh...

Ok, try this...

bootrec.exe /fixboot

then

bootrec.exe /fixmbr