Windows not booting after removed a secondary hard drive.

A

Aku12

Gawd
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Jun 19, 2002
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Not sure if this should be in here or the OS forums, sorry if this is the wrong spot.

Little back story: Go to the bottom for the quick and dirty.
Just bought Vista Ultimate from my University. Since I was installing a new OS, I figured I would repartition my drives to give my OS more space to breathe (20gb just isn't cutting it).
I took an unused identical 250gb drive and repartitioned it and installed windows. I kept the old Hard drive hooked up while doing this. I then spent quite a bit of time setting things up to my liking, installing apps and drives and what not.

Overnight I went ahead and did the transfer of all my storage from the old drive to the new drive. Woke up and took the old 250gb drive out, fixed the cables and went to turn on the computer and I get the "Disk boot error, insert system disk and hit enter".

I'm guessing the problem is that I installed vista with the old hard drive hooked up and it set it up as a dual boot with the other disk being the boot disk.

So I put the vista disk in and tried to repair it. It said it found the problem (said mislabeled partition) and fixed it. Rebooted and same thing.

Quick and dirty:
I installed Windows on a 2nd drive while a drive with windows installed was still hooked up to the computer. When I removed the drive with the initial install my computer gets the "Disk boot error, insert system disk and hit enter".

Is there a way I can fix this without completely reinstalling Vista, as I put about 4 hours into installing all my apps, drivers and tweaking the settings.

No information would be lost by doing this as its all backed up on the other partition, just my 4 hours of time.

Thanks for any help
 
I've run into this problem before. It happens a lot if you install Windows onto a SATA drive but keep an IDE drive still connected to the system. Basically what happens is the IDE drive ends up having the boot information, while the SATA drive becomes the system drive. You can confirm this situation by going into the Disk Management utility (when your system was still alive).

There's a way to fix it manually. It basically involves copying good BCD boot information from an existing Vista install, and copying it over to the SATA drive that is the system drive but doesn't have any boot information on it.

Sorry I don't have a link but maybe others can point you to the exact procedure.
 
Im at work, so I have time to some searching. That is what I assumed was the problem, just wasnt sure what to search, and all the problems I found on google were people with IDE's having the jumpers in the wrong spot.

I havn't wiped the old drive yet, so when I get home I can throw it in, copy it over and see if that works.

I figured when the install it just did it that way thinking I wanted a dual boot system.
 
I never have more than 1 drive hooked up when doing a windows install and never create more than 1 partition during the install for just this reason.

Windows likes to put the boot files in the wrong place given half a chance.
 
Did you check your BIOS to make sure your new sata drive is the primary boot drive? I've had this problem before becuase the bios changed the boot order on me when I changed sata ports for my hd.

Zack
 
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