Windows 7 wont boot when I remove non system drive

[DarkTXKnight]

during the windows 7 install, the setup found my IDE data drive in the slave position, and my intended system hard drive ( sata0) was listed 2nd. I chose the sata drive to do my install and everything has been working OK. I went to remove my data drive and during the next reboot the system says cannot find bootmgr. I reconnected the data drive ( that is IDE 1 ( slave to the dvdrom master) and everything boots fine.

My question is what is on that data drive that is allowing this to boot and how do I get everything on my system drive? I dont see any special partitions or anything on the data drive .

 

[armstrda]

sounds like your bootloader got loaded to the MBR of the "data" drive. It all depends on what drive is listed as your first boot drive in the BIOS when you install the OS. You can try to do a boot repair with the Win7 disc with the "data" drive disconnected and see if it will install the boot loader on your SATA drive.

 

[Billb2]

Originally posted by: armstrda
It all depends on what drive is listed as your first boot drive in the BIOS when you install the OS.

:frown:

Just because you put the Windows files on a particular drive, doesn't make that drive the boot drive. The boot drive is where the boot sector and MFT reside and that's always the drive that's set as the boot drive during the install.

 

[Binky]

The Win7 DVD is pretty good about fixing boot errors. I've screwed my dual boot up a few times moving drives around, etc. Just boot from the DVD with just the OS drive connected, and it *should* be able to fix you up.

*Discalimer - "Fixing" things often leads to breaking them more*

 

[tdawg]

Since Vista, whenever I reinstalled Vista, or when I installed Win 7 RC, I disconnected all but the primary hard drive, so that the installer wouldn't place any system files on any of my other drives. Once the install was complete and running, I'd shut the machine down and plug the drives back in. It sucks it has to be this way, in my experience at least.