Hard Drives And Booting
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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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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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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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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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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Apr 6, 2011
i built me a gaming computer with windows 7, its up and running. I have a old Dell with Windows Xp that i have had for 5 years. I want to put that hard drive in my new computer. is this possible? will there be any conflicts? I want to make it so maybe in bios i can select witch OS to boot up. Or maybe it defaults to Win7 and i can switch to WinXp whenever i wanted.
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May 16, 2011
I've recently purchased a PC with 1 64GB SSD and 1TB HD. Contrary to instructions the seller uploaded everything onto the SSD at C: and not just the OS. He now says I should use a disk partitioner to transfer the files. Also to reset my BIOS.
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Dec 16, 2009
I currently have a dual boot of Windows Vista Ultimate on one hard drive and Windows 7 RC1 on the other and was planning on
upgrading to Windows 7 ultimate. I have could either upgrade my Vista hard drive which would be easy or I could upgrade the release candidate Windows 7 which is a fresh install on a new drive. Which should I put Windows 7 on?
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Feb 5, 2013
If I Format my Hard drives ,do I lose all my systems ,Like Windows???
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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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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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Jun 3, 2011
I have two laptops that are identical...HP Compaq nw9440. I have a 100gig drive in LAPTOP#1, and a 750gig drive in LAPTOP#2. Both drives are running an identical Windows 7 Enterprise typical install. Can I put the 750gig drive in to LAPTOP#1? Can I create and save an NTBTLOG.txt file from each laptop (I.E. ntbtlog-LP1.txt) and select either one during the boot-up? The reason is LAPTOP#2 is not running very well. It has been dropped and I fear the motherboard may have a crack in it causing random boot problems. Sometimes the laptop doesn't even recognize the hard drive.
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Jul 28, 2009
64installed on c, win 7 later installed an d. dual boot has been working perfectly until
something caused the drives to switch. now win 7 starts ok but looks for all it's files on c, which is locked.
vista starts up fine, and sees all it's files on c as it should.
my windows 7 repair disk, created at start of win 7, does not correct problem, nor does system restore.
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Dec 23, 2009
After upgrading, I've found that I have 7 IDE hard drives ranging in size from 1 GB (!!!) to 200 GB. I'd like to get rid of them all. Is there a free reliable recylcing service out there. I've already wiped them clean (except for the 1 GB drive which won't spin up. It's from 1994).
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Nov 7, 2011
Just added this to my computer Safely Remove Hardware Shortcut - Create
and when I try and eject using the right click on the desktop I get
Problem Ejecting XXXXXx USB Device
The 'XXXXXXXXX' device is not removable and cannot be ejected or unplugged
This is when I try any combination of clicking stop on the drive name and drive letter in the window.
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Jul 10, 2012
I can only run one at a time instead of two. I would like to copy my 1.5tb over to my 2tb so I have a back up.
My laptop only holds 200GB of remaining data so I can't use that hard drive or I would.
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Jul 31, 2012
This morning my pc started acting up for some unknown reason. After numberous attempts to fix it, I decided to restore from a restore point. It said it did restore but things got even worse.I then decided to restore an Maxium Reflect image I had made a couple weeks ago. When I made the image, the pc was working fine. The restoring of the image went normally.I have two strange things occurring.
1. I have two hard drives with 3 partitions on each drive. After about 10 minutes I can NOT see second hard drive in either windows explorer or Disk Managaer.
2. When the pc is first booted and a few minutes pass, I get what sounds like a radio station playing. It only lasts for about 20-30 seconds then goes off. It comes back randoms times. I have checked the processes that are running and nothing stands out that would cause this.I built this PC in 2009 and the combination of these identical hard drives (1 TB Sata) have always acted strange at times. Example the second hard drive would NOT always boot when windows booted. This was usually fixed by just rebooting.I have checked and all fans are working normally and inside the case is relatively clean.Is there any software that can be used to check hard drives???
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Oct 5, 2010
I blow away a computer so I'm taking the Hard Drive out and putting it into another computer. From a AMD 3000 to a AMD 3800 and all it does in re-boot. I put in the XP CD and tried to do a repair but it didn't work or I didn't do it right.
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Feb 4, 2010
I have a laptop that came with Windows 7 home premium and one hard drive. I purchased a second hard drive and installed. Is there anyway to set this up, even if it means wiping everything and reinstalling, so that both hard drives are seen as one C drive? My laptop does not have a RAID option in the BIOS. What about if it was Windows 7 professional?
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Dec 15, 2009
If you think that switching to the high performance power plan is enough to set your computer to the best plan, well, it isnt.
Heres how to set your hard drives so they are included in the high performance:
1. open control panel
2. type power in the search bar and click "change power-saving settings"
3. to the right of the plan name click "change plan settings"
4. Click "change advanced power settings"
5. Go to the hard disk section and then "turn off hard disk after"
6. Enter 0 (zero) in the box (this will change to never)
Doing this prevents your disks from being "turned off".
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Dec 24, 2009
As my hard disk, I have a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black Edition.. it's 7200RPM, 32MB cache. Yet, WEI only gives it a score of 5.9. Everything else on my PC is a 7.0 or above.. any reason for that?
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Apr 5, 2012
Can I install software/programs onto my external Hard drive and run them through my laptop as normal?
I have lots and lots of adobe products and heaps of music and movie editing software. I dont use them everyday but play around often.
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Nov 1, 2009
i can't see the hard drives in my computer
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Jan 21, 2012
why does Toshiba have a C AND D hard drives. Other computers I have had only have 1 C hard drive
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Jan 29, 2012
Can we install same OS in different hard drives?
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Jan 20, 2010
Any trick on how to get windows7 to keep seeing your slave drives?
I have tried un-sleeping, increased time to 999min. All drives have drive letters & are listed as active and healthy etc. Each have mix of ide but mostly sata drives. Windows have been updated.
I have a small office with 8 computers trying to run Windows 7 now. All fresh installs onto new sata drives @ 2 weeks now. (The old xp drives was just turned off awaiting reformat). Everyone is starting to have the same problem with drives that disappears. On some of the computers it happens as quickly as in 5 min, sometimes right as you moving one file on one drive over to another drive. Nothing but rebooting all day.
Any clues?
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