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Win7 - boot partition with multiple hard drives?

JimKiler

JimKiler

Diamond Member
I am now attempting a third clean install of win7 because it keeps deciding to use a different hard drive than the install hard drive for the boot partition. If I delete and format the other drives it still uses them. Is the only way to get the boot partition on the system partition to unplug the SATA cables?

Am i doing things the hard way or not understanding how to do this?
 
Installing Windows with more than one hard drive connected to the PC is historically a bad idea. You often end up with a System disk with the wrong drive letter. I'd disconnect anything that looks like a hard drive until after the new OS is installed.
 
I assume you have the Boot Device in your BIOS set to an optical drive but there is also a setting for which HDD if there are multiple drives.

I'd also plug the drive you want as the system drive into the DISK 0 (SATA1) port.
 
I never had issues with multiple drives and installing windows until I went to Vista, you would think deleting the partition and formatting would force windows to use the drive i want, seems stupid to put the boot files elsewhere. Then my OS is dependant on two working drives instead of one. Oh well third time is the charm!
 
I also have Windows 7 thinking the the Drives are mixed up when I have both plugged in trying to do a clean install. I've checked the BIOS, swapped teh SATA cables, etc. but still Windows 7 keeps seeing my 160GB Raptor as DISK 0 when the BIOS shows my 300GB VelociRaptor as Disk 0. I ended up disabling the 160GB Raptor in the BIOS to force Windows to see and use only the 300GB drive as Disk 0 and make it C:

What is curious to me is that my Windows 7 Upgrade DVD is creating a 100MB system partition on the front end of the C:\ drive and I'm not sure why its doing that, since I deleted all partition information with "Delpart.exe" (as always) before ever attempting to install Windows. Is that something specific to the Upgrade Media because I've never seen windows do that before. With Vista, I had a full retail copy so I never had a problem.
 
Interesting link but they leave out Home as creating it. I have Win Home Premium and it was created when I did the install the first two times. I had no idea about choosing my boot HDD in the BIOS, i bet i could have installed only once if I would have realized that setting existed.
 
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