Trouble with disconnecting a hard drive

[strep3241]

I am going to reinstall Windows 7 and enable AHCI while I am at it. I have two identical hard drives so to be safe, I unhooked the storage drive or so I thought.

When I restarted just to make sure I had the right one unhooked, I get the disk boot failure message. So I figured I unhooked the wrong drive so I hook it back up and unhook the other one. Then I get the Windows has made some recent hardware changes, the device is inaccessible message. So now I am confused.

Why would unhooking the storage drive cause it not to boot? I don't know if this makes a difference but I unhooked the cables from the drive itself and not the motherboard ports since it is easier to unhook it from the drives.

 

[VirtualLarry]

When you installed Win7, did you have both drives connected, or just the boot drive? Sometimes (more often than it should) Win7 likes to write the bootloader info to the non-boot drive.

In fact, I encountered something similar when I was setting my up BIL's machine. I had an SSD plugged into SATA port 0 on the mobo, and a 1TB magnetic drive in SATA port 1.

Windows thought that the magnetic drive was the primary drive, for some stupid reason.

 

[bacillus]

Did you originally set up the storage drive as a dynamic disc?

 

[strep3241]

When you installed Win7, did you have both drives connected, or just the boot drive? Sometimes (more often than it should) Win7 likes to write the bootloader info to the non-boot drive.

In fact, I encountered something similar when I was setting my up BIL's machine. I had an SSD plugged into SATA port 0 on the mobo, and a 1TB magnetic drive in SATA port 1.

Windows thought that the magnetic drive was the primary drive, for some stupid reason.

Yes I believe I did have both drives hooked up. So does that mean I have to have both drives hooked up in order to reinstall Windows? I am pretty sure I know which one is the storage drive but not 100% positive.

Did you originally set up the storage drive as a dynamic disc?

I don't think so. I don't remember choosing anything like that. I just formatted it and set it up as NTFS. Is there a way to find out if I did or not?

 

[strep3241]

So I figured out which drive has Windows installed on it.

Here is what I want to do. I want to disconnect the storage drive and do a repair install on the Windows drive. So in the future, I don't have to have both drives hooked up in order to boot into Windows.

Instead of doing a repair install, couldn't I just go ahead and enable AHCI and do a fresh install while leaving the storage drive disconnected? Then reconnect it after I am done installing Windows.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Instead of doing a repair install, couldn't I just go ahead and enable AHCI and do a fresh install while leaving the storage drive disconnected? Then reconnect it after I am done installing Windows.

Yes, I would recommend that.

 

[Voo]

Instead of doing a repair install, couldn't I just go ahead and enable AHCI and do a fresh install while leaving the storage drive disconnected? Then reconnect it after I am done installing Windows.

Yep, either disconnect the drive and let windows create a new mbr (fixmbr) or for future installs make sure you have no other disk with an OS connected (not sure if the problem only happens with MS OSes - probably).

Actually I can understand the reasoning behind the decision - adding yourself to an existing MBR is far less invasive, although I've been bitten by the same problem..

 

[strep3241]

I figured out why I couldn't boot with the second drive disconnected. The second drive is listed as system, active and primary partition under disk management. While the Windows drive is listed as boot, page file, crash dump, and primary partition.

The Windows drive should be listed as system and active, not the second drive.

If I select make the partition active on the Windows drive, would that affect the data on the second drive?