Help: My OS is on 1 drive but PC won't boot w.out the other drive

[cjm18]

I had one OLD sata drive and one PATA drive. I removed the PATA drive and tried to install vista on a fresh brand new SATA drive but my PC wouldnt let me.

I assume this is because my original OS was on my PATA drive. ( I think I had an OS on the old SATA as well). SO I reconected the PATA and installed vista and windows 7 on 2 seperate partitions on the new SATA drive.

I want to get rid of the PATA drive but I can't boot into any OS without it. How can I get around this? Thanks.

 

[TheGamerZ]

Change your boot priority in the bios?

 

[cjm18]

That's the other weird thing.. The PATA is not even showing up as an option to boot from in the bios. It is not showing up in "my computer" either.

I have the new SATA with vista and win7 as the first boot device

 

[TheGamerZ]

Jumper set correctly on the PATA drive?

You should be able to boot and install an OS onto the SATA. Have you tried different SATA ports?
Have you tried disabling the IDE ports altogether? (providing your DVD drive isn't PATA)

 

[cjm18]

Jumper set correctly on the PATA drive?

You should be able to boot and install an OS onto the SATA. Have you tried different SATA ports?
Have you tried disabling the IDE ports altogether? (providing your DVD drive isn't PATA)

I didnt change anything with the jumpers so they should be okay.

Haven't tried disabling IDE because the dvd is PATA

I think I will try putting the main sata in sata port one instead of two but I doubt that works.

 

[cjm18]

I am looking at disk management in win 7 and here is what I see.

My pata shows up but has no drive letter. healthy( system, active, primary partition.)

The old sata says page file and primary partition.

the new sata has boot, crash, dump, prim. partition on the win7 part and just primary partiion on the vista part



I renamed the win 7 part C:// and just realized that the PATA was called C. Is that bad?


EDIT. I renamed the pata G. I think the problem here is that the system file is on the PATA. Theere is a windows folder wiht a system 32 folder which has barely anything in it. Barely meaning just a macromedia flash folder. I guess this was my XP OS from a LONG time ago. Also, the new SATA has a system32 folder as well on both partitions. Now I am confused.

 

[MrF]

My pata shows up but has no drive letter. healthy( system, active, primary partition.)

The old sata says page file and primary partition.

the new sata has boot, crash, dump, prim. partition on the win7 part and just primary partiion on the vista part

This means that your PATA drive had boot priority when you installed Vista and Windows 7.

tried to install vista on a fresh brand new SATA drive but my PC wouldnt let me

What does that mean? Did you get an error message? What did you do exactly? You need to do that again but do it correctly and install on the SATA drive with no other drive attached.

 

[cjm18]

http://www.techenclave.com/guides-and-tutorials/moving-vista-boot-manager-bcd-114342.html

I found out how to fix it without reinstalling windows. Windows disk was able to recover my other OS's.

It was a catch 22. When I tried to install vista on the new SATA, windows said it couldnt find windows on my system when I did not have the PATA attatched. Therefore it wouldnt let me install windows w/o the PATA. There was probably some way around it.