Booting To Another Hard Drive
May 6, 2009
My computer yesterday was an XP machine with one hard drive. I wanted to test Windows 7 but I was afraid I would screw something up with my XP drive in the process. We'll call this Drive A.
Yesterday I bought a new hard drive, Drive B. I downloaded the Windows 7 ISO, got some drivers, and turned off my computer. I physically removed Drive A from the computer and put Drive B in. I started the computer and put the DVD in. Setup was fine, I had some trouble with getting the onboard NIC to work but I was able to overcome.
Now I needed to get back into my XP install to get some stuff done (play video games). I shut my computer down, pulled out Drive B, put Drive A back in and booted up. But I got a boot error message, and it looks like it's a Windows 7 Boot error message. How can this be if I removed the hard drive.
0xc000000e
The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible
It's almost as if my computer is trying to boot to Windows 7 even though I removed the hard drive containing the operating system. How do I get into my XP system? The drive is fine, I connected it as a slave and I can access the files on there. I'm guess Windows 7 makes some kind of change on the motherboard that forces it to boot to 7?
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Jun 16, 2011
I have a HP Touchsmart IQ500. Turning my computer PC on today, all I got was a blue HP invent screen with setup, boot menu, system recovery, and system diagnosis, and I could not get past it. I entered the BIOS and figured out that the hard drive was listed as "not installed." Pretty sure that is the main problem.I tried a system restore (with the Windows 7 install disc), but I guess the computer couldn't read the hard drive enough to enter safe mode (I tried restarting and F8ing several times). I put in an external hard drive, and the BIOS read it; however, windows does not allow you to partition an OS on a hard drive.
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Oct 19, 2012
My friend asked me to fix her laptop, which has been failing to boot, getting as far as the blue Windows 7 login screen then hanging. The login UI doesn't load, it's just the blue background.I tried to re-install Windows from the boot disc, but when I put in the disc, I wasn't able to boot from it. Instead the computer booted from the hard-drive again and hung at the same place. This is after changing the boot priority in the BIOS.Since the laptop is out of warranty, and is to all intents and purposes a brick, I removed the Hard-drive, and connected it to my computer to see if I could reformat the drive from there. The thing that has really puzzled me though, is that my computer wouldn't boot when this hard drive was attached, despite running fine before I attached the drive, and after I removed it.
Which leads me to think there's possibly a really malicious virus or something on the drive, which makes it the default boot device, despite having a corrupted operating system installed that won't boot.
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Mar 21, 2011
Ok I have a emachine e725 running windows 7 32bit and a acer running on windows vista. My emachine recently crashed in the blue screen and I tried to complete a system restore. I was able to get through the advanced boot menu and use the repair your computer option to restore windows. During the windows setup process I got another blue screen and the computer restarting. It then started the process over and once it got to the step that says windows is preparing setup, it gives an error msg saying something along the lines of windows was interupted and needs to restart to complete installation, and it has an option to press ok. This cycle continues and I can not open in safe mode because it says "windows can not complete the installation in safemode. Also the option to repair your computer in the advanced menu options is no longer available. So after wrestling with windows starting up I decided to create a back up and restore disc on my acer for my windows 7 computer. I tried putting it on a disc but it would not boot. So I tried creating a installation disc of windows 7 and tried booting from the cdrom drive. Once I did that I got a error msg saying "device driver not found: MSCD001 No valid cdrom device drivers selected. It then gives me the A:>. Im not sure if I created the disc wrong since I cant unzip the entire file I downloaded with needing an encryption password.
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Mar 5, 2012
Motherboard: Asus A8N5X
So after the hard drive fiasco that I reported in another thread, I got clever and decided to create an "Emergency Boot Drive" that would have Windows on it as well as some utilities for data recovery. I took one of the many old hard drives that I have floating around and plugged it into the computer AND unplugged my other two drives. Then I ran Windows Install off the DVD and installed Windows to the old drive. I installed my software. All was good. I plugged in the other two drives and tried to boot from the "Emergency" drive and it worked fine.Last step was to unplug the emergency drive from the motherboard, connect it via USB and try to boot. The BIOS sees the drive and I tell it to boot from the drive. So the computer is booting. The "Starting Windows" message comes up and then the system reboots. This happens everytime I try it.Does Windows reset the USB ports so that the drive suddenly vanishes?
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Jul 2, 2012
I had my old hard drive installed in my Windows 7 computer. It worked for several months but now it started booting from the old drive that still has Windows Vista on it. My simple fix has been to unplug that drive while booting it up. Can I just delete the Windows Vista files?
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Nov 8, 2012
It just shows the blue colour only but not recognized by laptop
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Jan 5, 2010
I am trying to wipe my current XP installation clean and move on to Windows 7.
I first tried to install the setup.exe (Custom install option of course) from within the XP OS, but soon discovered you cannot do that and wipe out my only partition on C: at the same time.
I don't have a DVD-RW drive to write a boot disk, so instead I am trying to install through my external hard drive. I meticulously followed this tutorial from PC World yet when I instruct the PC in BIOS to boot from the external hard drive, I keep getting an "invalid system disk, press any key" error when the computer boots and looks for the setup files. This is despite the fact that setup seems to work perfectly from within the XP OS.
PC World tutorial:
Install Windows 7 From an External Hard Drive - PC World
Can anyone please offer me any helpful advice to get the external hard drive setup to work or help me find a way to install 7 from within XP?
Anyone know exactly why I keep getting the "invalid disk" error each time when I try to boot from my external hard drive? As mentioned in the PC World tutorial, I marked the external hard drive as an active partition and the setup files seem to work fine from within XP. If it helps, in the external hard drive root folder is both the Windows 7 ISO and all the files contained (which I extracted using PowerISO).
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Feb 21, 2011
I have a laptop that has Vista installed on it. I have an upgrade disc for Windows 7 and I am thinking about performing a "clean installation" over the Vista OS - which I know is allowed, on the following link;click here Now, I would like to create another partition (on the same hard drive) and install Vista (using the same disc that it came with the laptop) onto that blank hard drive partition
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Aug 17, 2012
This week, I encountered the following strange problem for which I haven't found a final solution so far, though I have found some bandaids. But having a complete solution -or at least a reason why this problem occurs- would be great:I have a working installation of Windows 7 Professional x64 in UEFI mode. The main disk, SSD #1, contains the following partitions (using GPT): ESP, MSR, system, data. An additional disk, HD #2, with a single data partition (using MBR) is also attached to the system. With this setup, everything works fine.Now, after adding another disk, HD #3, to the system -my old system disk (bootable, using MBR, one active primary partition and an extend partition with three logical disks)- Windows will no longer boots completely: The boot process begins, the Windows logo is shown. Then, a message is shown in text mode "Windows is loading files" with a loading bar. After a while the boot process stops and I am dropped into the EFI shell. After removing the offending HD #3, Windows boots normally again.
I tried removing HD #2 and only attaching HD #3 together with SSD #1, but this yielded the same problem. Using SSD #1 by itself works fine though. Booting from a Linux live-cd works without problems. All disks and partitions are found and can be mounted. There, I erased the disk signature from the offending HD #3 and now Windows was able to boot and also found all disks and partitions correctly. But after a reboot the same problem reappeared
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Feb 14, 2012
how do I disable message that come while booting s m a r t hard drive detect error!
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Nov 14, 2012
I have a hard drive I want to backup to a 64gb flash drive and then restore it to another different hard drive than where it came from. I have windows 7 and office on my laptop and I want it on my desktop pc. There isn't close to 64gb of info on my laptop so it should be fine even though the hard drive says I have 160gb. It is all free space except for those programs.
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Oct 25, 2011
So, I have a i7 2600K system with a solid state disk as the boot drive, and an older (c2008) Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB drive as the data drive for programs (that I deem as not worthy of the quick load times). The hard drive has given me some errors over time, and I bought a hard disk to replace it (a Hitachi 1TB). The issue I'm having is that the fact that Windows 7 puts a small (100MB) partition on the F3, and for some reason, even though I'm running Acronis 2012, it doesn't seem to be able to clone the F3 over to the Hitachi. I've also tried Drive XML, and for my 2 hour wait, I only managed to acquire a boot error. Thankfully, I've not done anything rash to destroy the data on the F3, but given the fact that I've seen corrupted files in Steam from that drive, I'm not will to trust it long term with my data. I really need to get the data onto that Hitachi, though... Anyone have any advice for upgrading the HDD in a SSD/HDD system? I don't really feel like it should be so hard, especially if I've bought Acronis True Image, but maybe they haven't designed their product to handle this scenario quite yet?
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Oct 21, 2009
I have a slight issue that I'm not sure how to fix. It's nothing serious but it's something I'd like to take care of.
Basically, I bought a new hard drive, made it the primary drive, and kept the old one in so I could transfer everything over to the new one and keep the old as my backup drive.
I installed Windows 7 but when I boot my machine without the disc in the drive it wont boot. I made my old drive the primary one again and I discovered that when I installed Windows 7 it put the boot information on the old hard drive instead of the new one.
Basically, I'm looking for an easy way to get it to boot from the new hard drive without having to use the old one as the primary. Any ideas?
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Jun 26, 2011
Okay, I turn on my computer, and after four seconds it shuts off, then 4 seconds later, it shuts off, etc. Then after this process repeats itself for about 4 times, it will take a long time (~5-10 minutes) to show the computer manufacturer logo. Then after that,another ~2 minutes to show the Windows logo, then ~5 minutes to show the user account selection screen. I tried taking out the RAM, leaving one stick in, and then booting it up. It worked, so I am currently in the process of replacing the RAM (I now have 1GB instead of 2). But after a while, it got worse. I have no idea what to do know, and I really need this computer for work.
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Apr 16, 2012
I am trying to boot windows server installed in external hard disk from my windows 7 pc but when I am trying to do so it my pc is flashing blue screen and my pc reboots with win 7.
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Mar 30, 2012
I have an internal hard disk not in use ,and I would like to make it as external disk !I looked on the net and I found I should have the " encelsure " butt I think I wont find it here in my city .So is there another way ? like usb -esata cable
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Mar 4, 2010
Me and my brother built me a new computer from scratch (he did the building - i did the watching). I purchased an internal hard drive from Overclockers UK. It's a Samsung 1TB drive. I also have a 64 Solid-state drive in there as my primary hard drive that Windows was installed on and a couple of programs are installed on. My storage disk (the 1TB disk) is for all my music/films etc. Whenever I drag and drop a file into the Samsung hard-drive - it copies it rather than moves it instantly.When I had a laptop, I had 3 external hard drives and this is the way it copied files onto them.how I can get the internal drive to stop acting like an external drive?
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Dec 24, 2011
I have a virus infected sata hard drive with windows 7 on it. It has the win 7 anti virus 2012 on it, and it's a cybercriminal virus. I have lots of files I want to transfer to the new sata drive. I already have windows 7 installed on the new drive. How do I get the files from the bad drive to the new one?
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Jan 21, 2013
I have a USB Webcam 6.1.7601.17514 from Microsoft installed on a Fujitsu Laptop (Windows 7 ) and I want to copy and install it on another Fujitsu laptop (Windows 7).The other laptop the camera is not working and there is no webcam driver installed.
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Apr 22, 2012
I have a server (HP Proliant ML350 G5) that has a hard disk with Windows 7 Enterprise and Ubuntu (I'll talk about that on UbuntuForums, though). I recently acquired a Dell Dimension 9150. I moved the hard disk from the server to the Dell. Now Windows won't boot. It gets as far as the OS selection. I select Windows 7 from the OS choices. I don't even get the Starting Windows screen. If I try Safe Mode, I get the driver loading screen, but nothing more than that. When I try Startup Repair, it hangs at "Loading Windows Files".I cannot re-install windows because of programs and admin tools found on that hard disk.
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Nov 16, 2009
I have Vista installed on my Hard Drive, 250 GB.
But i recently purchased a 2nd Hard Drive, 500 GB, and i want to install Windows 7 on it.
Is that possible, to have both separately?
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Aug 27, 2010
I had a failure to my system drive (was my fault). Anyhow the drive was still under warranty so I did an RMA with WD. While waiting for my replacement drive, I reinstalled Windows 7 to another HD and it is now my system drive. Now that my replacement drive have arrived, I image the other HD and restore to the replacement HD. My question is, how can I have it boot from the replacement HD?
What I did was mark the old HD as inactive and marked the replacement as active but when I boot up, it tells me it cannot find a boot device.
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Jan 16, 2013
When I am installing Windows (XP or 7), I first set the computer's CMOS to "Boot from CD ROM" first. Then I put the factory CD or DVD into the drive. Then I turn the machine on. After POST, I see the message "Press any key to boot from CD" and it continues. OK - that's normal
Now - let's do this: I copy the image of the bootable CD onto a flash drive. I then set the computer to "Boot from USB Flash drive" first. I install the flash drive. I turn the machine on. I never see the message "Press any key to boot from CD".
The computer's BIOS has several choices of "boot from flash drive" Which one do I choose? Question: Do I have to format the flash as a bootable? Is a simple "copy all" from a factory installation disk sufficient? Should I use a "clone' program to prepare the flash drive?
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Aug 29, 2009
I am currently trying to install Windows 7 Professional RTM to my computer. After installing it onto my laptop, I followed the same exact steps to install the 64 bit version instead of the 32 bit on my netbook. A problem that occured is that when I go on the bios, there is several options to boot from, and none of them are working. I tried USB-CD, USB-FDD, USB-HDD and none are working... Does anyone have any suggestions?
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Oct 21, 2011
laptop not booting on dvd or pen drive. i have tried a lot. my dvd drive is ok but not reading windows cd or any bootable pendrive
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Oct 8, 2011
make a dualboot comp by adding windows XP to a new partition. I created the new partition with 20gb. (From the 500 of my actual harddrive)But before I actually installed on that, I got distracted with a second harddrive that my dad got(for no reason). It had a full copy of Windows XP backed up on it from another computer, so I figured I would just use that for the dualboot. I plugged it in (wired the same way as my old harddrive, but different data slot), restarted, checked the harddrive in explorer - all the data was there / reading correctly / etc, and I used 'easyBCD' to add the new harddrive to the boot list.(Which, of course, crashes if I try to start it. I just wanted to see what it would do). For a reason I can't remember, I unplugged the second harddrive for a bit, started the computer on accident (I don't know if anything loaded before I shut it off), and then when I plugged it back in.Windows 7 would not launch. It goes to a DOS-like window, except it's just a flashing _ and it never does anything even after a few minutes. XP didn't work still.. so I decided to reinstall XP (as I couldn't tell which harddrive was which on the list, I unplugged the main harddrive while installing onto the new).. and when I did this.. it formatted and installed fully... then restarted.. then restarted.. and restarted.. and just kept restarting, never showing any thing past the manufacturer logo/BIOS load-button-message-thing. So, I then try to use my 3-disk Windows7Recovery disk(burned myself with a program apparently included by the manufacturer.) It installed fully, appearing to work.. but when I launched it, it said "Invalid Partition Table" and wouldn't boot past that. When I insert my driver installer disk, it gives me a basic DOS window thing. dir A: shows the files in the disk. dir B: for some reason shows the same. C: says "Error reading from drive C: DOS area: general failure". All other letter:'s just say "invalid drive". (I'm doing this with both harddrives in.) I attempted connecting the harddrives to an old computer, but it gave an error for both. (It detected the harddrives, but said it had an error reading from it. Windows Explorer asked me to format it... {i'm willing to format one of the drives if anybody thinks it will help, but the old harddrive has data I'd prefer not to lose.} ) Looking on google, I saw several problems that all have similar problems (less overdescripptive than I am though) but none of the fixes suggested worked for me. Also - as I have two different with different errors, I only need to make one of them work.)Also - my other available computer has a CD burner / floppy drive if either are required. I also have several USB's. The computer can boot from USB's and CD's (tested), and I could easily take the floppy thingy and connect it to the computer.also - this computer is probably still under warranty unless unscrewing the hard drive voids it. .. does that count as modification of the computer?
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Nov 10, 2011
I'm using an HP laptop and made a bootable flash key with the Microsoft utility (which I downloaded from Microsoft) to make a Windows 7 installation. I (supposedly) changed the boot order in the bIOS to look first at the key. Didn't work - booted directly into Windows 7 (seemingly bypassed the bootable key).
1. How do I tell if the USB key is bootable?
2. What might be the reason(s) why my laptop won't boot from the USB key?
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Jun 23, 2012
I was wondering if there are any issue with dual booting Windows 7 pro 64 bit on an internal SSD drive. I currently have Windows 7 pro 64 bit on a 500gb 7200 hard drive plus a backup 1 TB 7200 rpm drive; but I wanted the speed I would get by installing win7 pro 64bit on a 250gb SSD drive. I would basically only install specific essential software like Adobe Premeire Pro and Photoshop, among others. I originally was going to use the SDD drive as a scratch disc but after reading, I thought it might be better to just install Win7 on the SSD drive. This way I could also experiment with what would be the best configuration. I still get confused about scratch disc and how useful they are if you have plenty of memory.
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Jun 13, 2012
In order to be able to Boot from a flash drive , I understand this ability must be enabled in ones system .I have a desktop and a new laptop in neither of which do I see this choice .I presume this is a choice originally installed on the m/b and it would not , therefore , be possible to use software to enable it ?
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Jul 24, 2012
I have instlled windows 7 in my c: drive and booting files are stored in another drive(d: drive). Due to this problem im unable to store my important files in d: drive. If I save my important files in that drive whenever I want to chnge the OS I suppose to format the two drives c: and d: drives. so I may lost my important files.
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