win7 install made secondary drive 'system' how to reverse?

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FireStormGS

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 24, 2001
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I did a fresh install of win7 a few months ago to my c: with all three of my hard drives in the system. But now when you go through computer management to disk management, the c: shows as boot, page, crash, primary, and the d: shows as system, primary. How do I make the c: include the system property so that the system will boot with only c: connected. Currently both the c: and d: must be connected to the system otherwise it will say there is no boot drive when powering up the computer.
 
That sucks, try disconnecting the secondary drive and perform a repair install?
 
with only the c: connected there is no boot drive found on start up, and loading with the win7 install disc it isn't able to detect any installations. but when in the win7 installer from the boot disc i am able to browse through the c: drive.
 
You need to make C active first. You can use GParted live CD to do that.
Then, disconnect the other drives, make W7 drive boot drive in BIOS if it is not already, and try the repair with the install DVD again.
 
Can you mark C: as active right from Disk Management? If not, like it was pointed out, gparted can do this but for some reason I don't remember it being called "make active" in gparted, I thought I remember them calling it something else? Either way it should work. Hopefully you don't end up with 2 boot options. If that happens you'll have to delete one of them.
 
In GParted, you right click the partition of interest and select "Manage Flags".
In the window that opens up, select the "boot" flag and apply. That makes that partition active.
 
Yea I've set the C to active through disk management. Now both C and D are active. Is there no way to make C the system drive through windows? I'm sketched out about trying to repair windows from the win7 install disc.
 
Well setting C to active forced my hand. After I restarted it got a boot manager missing error and couldn't do anything with all or just the C connected. With just C connected I booted with the win7 disc and let it repair the start up problems. Now in disc manager the C is active and system which is good, but the the D is still marked as active, where/how do I make it non-active?
 
Enter the BIOS and make sure the hard drive that has C on it has boot priority.

Now, it does not matter if the other hard drive has an active partition. It will never get control as long as the hard drive it is on does not have boot priority.

If it bothers you, you can use GParted as explained before to remove the boot flag from it.
 
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