so ever since I got Windows 7, i have had nothing but nightmares alternating between 2 hard drives.
before back when I was running XP I had 2 HDDs that I would alternate between. both had XP installed, one of which was for backup. whenever I had a problem with my current OS, I would just swap the HDDs and run my backup while I image the other screwed up one.
now with Windows 7, i cannot do that because of the STUPID bootloader. bootloader made me have nightmares at night. pretty much what happens when I swap it says "BOOTMGR is Missing". now whats really messed up is that, I think the PC stores the bootloader info NOT ON THE HDD, but somewhere in the BIOS or mobo. because i completely disable the old HDD that I used to bootup with 3 partitions, and the one im trying to boot up has 2 partitions and it worked perfectly. but since i used norton ghost and try to boot up after restoring a backup of 7 on it, it says "BOOTMGR is missing".
both of my HDD windows got screwed up, and even my CD ROM STOPPED WORKING! i couldnt even recover it from the W7 disk. but I maanged to fool the system by swapping CDs and finally got into the recovery and repaired one of my HDDs boot loader. but the one I need it to work within 2 days is still messed up. can someone explain to me how this bootloader works and what i need to do?
I got 7, XP, and Vista on SATA, and 7 and Ubuntu on IDE. both worked fine whenever I needed to swap between them until i messed with Norton Ghost
do i need to format my HDD and write 0s to it? it worked for my SATA that wouldnt boot up and give me NTLDR error before. same crap with W7 bootloader.
ive got some older games that just don't display correctly at all on Windows 7.Actually, its so blurry it goes beyond frustration and borders on hilarity.Here's a few examples.Serious Sam 1 main menu Serious Sam 2 main menu Doom 3 (I clicked "something" and it pulled up this menu which displays as well as the something I clicked.)Keep in mind, those screenshots are 1440x900 resolution in Windows 7 64bit.I had these games back in the day on an XP system, and they displayed/played just fine. (of course the hardware was different too)Serious Sam are GOG.com games, Doom 3, PCDVD.I would also like to mention that I play Descent 3, which was released before all three of these aforementioned games, and it displays/plays just fine.Before I have someone tell me to switch the compatibility to XP, I've already done that. Actually, I've tried every compatibility, even Windows 95.I tried running the games on and off of disable visual themes, disable desktop composition, disable display scaling on high DPI settings.I've already updated my ALL drivers to the newest they could be. Sounds counter productive since its older games, but I still did it.I have the newest version of Direct X installed.I have the most recent patch of Doom 3 installed which is supposed to have Vista/7 support.
I went to boot up my laptop PC and I see H20Insyde asking me for a password. I have no idea where this came from. What could have caused this? I have always booted up and the only thing I see is my normal screen from Windows 7 that ask for my password.
I'm a gamer and I want to have 2 desktops such as 1 with a character of the game I play for when I'm with friends and 1 of a lightning storm when I'm out in public. Is there a shortcut such as pressing CRT+S or WIN+S to change desktops so when im in public and I have the wrong desktop I can press the hotkey to change it and change it back when im with friends?
I am trying to add a page number series on the bottom of the pages and alternating headers at the top, odd and even pages, and to begin these on the third page of my document. I cannot get it to do this. The page numbering shanges when I try to add the alterning header, and none of it will begin on the third page, even using a page break. How can I do all this?
All PSU SATA power cables I've seen have only four connectors on each cable. Assuming the rail can handle the load and the wire used is large enough to avoid a voltage drop, is there any reason why there can't be more than four HDDs on a cable?
What I am wanting to do is run an SSD (boot/program) and six data drives (probably 2 TB WD Greens) on a single cable that I can make up (the PSU is a modular Corsair HX750; a bit oversized but that will cut down on heat and, hopefully, increase the life of the PSU) to cut down on cable clutter (the case I want to use is a bit tight; space to put it is a problem so it needs to be small). The original cables are made with 18 AWG wire. By using #14 AWG wire, the calculated voltage drop at the last HDD in the string (the SDD would be first) will actually be less than on the Corsair cable. The computer would read or write to no more than two of the HDDs (and the SDD) at any one time. There will also be two hot swap bays (3.5" and 2.5") in the computer (for making back ups) as well as an optical drive but each one of those three will get their own cable.
I have 2 HDDs that I want to switch the OS of each one to the other. One is a laptop 140GB HD that has Windows 7 64-bit and the other is a Desktop 150GB HD with Windows XP 32-bit. The laptops HD was pre-installed with the OS and the Desktop is unknown. Just as an fyi the laptops cd drive is broken and the desktops doesn't burn. What are my options on how to switch the two?
How to set up my 120 GB SSD as just my OS Drive then use my 1 TB and my 750 and another 750 for data etc. So I have backed up all my data from my current install (right now I am running my OS from the 1 tb and the SSD isn't even being used yet. I just wanted to know the best way to set it up so I can use the SSD JUST FOR THE OS and then install programs and steam etc in the 1 TB (cuz i got at least 500 GB of games from steam). Can I just install the OS on the SSD then format my 1 TB and make 3 folders Users, Program Files and Program Files (x86), and then install programs in to the appropriate folders? User Profiles - Create and Move During Windows 7 Installation.
I am running VMWare Workstation.I am very new to this.After a couple installs of the Workstation, I was able to create and power on Linux VMs on the Workstation.But the thing is it just sees itself (the VM) and the removable devices I put on there, but not the HDDs on my computer.
I'm new around here so, if you've seen this before, please bear with me.I have a computer with 3 hard disks in it as follows.Patriot Pyro 120 GB on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (installed first).WD Velociraptor 450 GB on Windows 8 Pro x64 (installed second).Samsung something 2 TB storage (forget about this one).The 2 operating systems are completely independent and functioning properly; obviously, the SSD (Pyro) is set to boot first in the bios and, at start-up, there's no boot manager asking me which OS I intend to use. Basically, every time I want to logon on my Velociraptor with Windows 8 I have to press F8 at start-up and choose from the given list of bootable HDDs.Now, I've tried EasyBCD without luck and I've read somewhere that, apparently, the Windows 7 boot manager can't boot a Windows 8 partition so, my question is, is there a way to add my Windows 8 Velociraptor to the boot manager of the first booting HDD, i.e the SSD with Windows 7?
i have an odd 5900 RPM HDD that i need to swap out. i'm going to swap it out mainly because it's better suited for storage/backup rather than being my main HDD for usage/boot-up.
i don't want to reinstall Windows 7 (7100) and i want to copy everything from HDD "a" to HDD "b". any ideas/suggestions/comments?
I've found this guide Windows 7 Installation - Transfer to a New Computer for changing all my components except HDD.My question is, I currently use my install as an HTPC. If I use the sysprep method, will the codecs (ffdshow etc) work correctly afterwards, or will I have to go through installing them all again?I understand graphics drivers will need re-installing.
I installed Windows 7 on a 20GB partition on a 2TB HDD for my PC on a AMD E-350 APU motherboard.
1) Can I use the other partition that doesn't have Windows 7 installed and RAID it with another empty HDD?
2) Will I be able to add another HDD down the road and add it to the RAID without erasing all my data without using a RAID Manager like Intel Rapid Storage?
If Yes: How can I do this?
If No: Is there a RAID Manager that I can use that will allow me to do this?
At present I have my WIN 7 set to Boot up without a Password. I would now like to change that siuation back to a "Password Required" Boot.
I have tried going into User Accounts >Change Passwords where I get the three boxes "Current Password", "Change Password" and "Confirm New Password" all blank as expected.
Its what happens next that has me puzzled. I tried leaving the "Current Password" blank , entered a new Password into the "Change Password" box and re-entered this into the last Box .
I now get the message " The password you typed is incorrect. Please re-type your new Password"
anybody else got this problem? anybody able to fix this? seems like a bug to me, not sure though. I also sometimes get the message "you DESTINATION file is too big for the file you are copying!" any solutions also?
I was given two External usb HDDs both 80gb each, my friend said they were totally unusable on his laptops they were corrupted but using them on my laptop I successfully formatted and am using them as we speak. I'm just concerned with whether or not I will lose all i've backed up onto these External HDDs because of them not working on my friend's laptops but working perfectly fine on mine!
I recently had Windows 7 Pro installed onto my 80GB HDD. This was the only HDD plugged in when the installation too place.
Now, when I plug in either of my other internal HDDs, windows will not detect either. I have tried different jumper and IDE cable settings but it will not detect either of the other hard drives.
Also, while im thinking about it, what is the best way to set up in terms of HDDS and IDE cables and jumpers?
I guess windows 7 should be plugged into IDE 1 Primary Does it matter if i used IDE 1 secondary or IDE 2 primary/secdondary for disc drives and other internal hard drives? Should I have my windows HDD jumper set to 'master with slave' and any other HDD(s) set to 'slave'?
I just finished a new build and put in 3 WD Black 640GB drives in a RAID 5 config. After about 20hrs of runtime the system indicated a drive failure. Intel Matrix Manager confirmed this so I contacted WD support about getting an RMA. The tech wrote back that these drives and any WD consumer grade drives are not suitable for RAID; here is a quote from the tech: "The Caviar Black are not RAID edition drives. If you install and use a desktop edition hard drive connected to a RAID controller, the drive may not work correctly. This is caused by the normal error recovery procedure that a desktop edition hard drive uses.
I am upgrading my HTPC that i put together a few years back to have a SSD as a boot drive to increase space, quiet background running and speed up booting, etc.Everything was running fine before trying to exchange the raptor for the m4. I had a big issue getting Windows installed on m4 but finally did a clean install when no harddrive was connected except the SSD to the original SATA port of the boot drive. Once I had windows installed, and i was able to boot up with only the SSD attached to the boot SATA port, I attached the 3 storage drives to their original SATA ports and got an error when booting... it paused in mid boot, then started searching for a boot disk in the DVD drive. I looked at the BIOS and the SSD is listed as 1st (port0) on hard drive boot order and hard drive is 1st boot priority. I unplugged all 3 storage drives and it booted up without an issue
I'm trying to install Windows 7 and the setup isn't recognising any of my hard drives. I know they work because I've tested them on another computer. Odd thing is the BIOS just says 'Hard Drive' rather than listing the manufacturer and model like it usually does.
I am looking for a utility that will analyze HDDs of client computers on a Windows Network. I've looked around and seen utilities that will defrag any number of computers on a network, but really I don't want that as they require an agent to be installed, and I don't want to install anything else on the client computers, they are full to bursting. Anyway...So just a utility or program that would analyze the disk of each client computer, and generate some sort of report or list of client computers in need of a defrag that I would preform during off hours, or schedule to run late at night.
I've just discovered (after a panicked hour trying to work out what was going wrong) that my boot and system partitions for windows 7 are on different hard drives. The boot partition is on my 120GB SSD and the system partition is on my 320GB WD HDD.
This means that I have to have both hard drives plugged in for my system to boot. Obviously this isn't the best set up as if one of the hard drives fails then I'm screwed! Is there any way to fix this without having to re-install windows?
Just got my new system up and running. My system drive is a 256 gb SSD, and I have two internal 3TB HDDs...one data and one backup. I also have an external 2TB USB HDD that I will use as a backup (albeit, less frequently than the internal backup). Because of the SSD, the power management for turning off hard drives automatically is disabled. This is recommended for running SSDs. Therefore, both of my internal HDDs are constantly spinning.I would like to find a solution to manage the HDDs, but at the least find a solution to turn off (or just stop spinning) the internal backup drive, since it is not used very frequently. It would be nice to do this with the external HDD, but I'll probably just unplug it when not in use...easy enough.I searched for any software/utilities to do this, but couldn't find anything. Other users have the same idea, but it doesn't seem like they found a software solution either. As of right now, I've determined my options are:
1) Manually unplug/plug internal drive. Requires access to the inside of the case.
2) Get a mobile rack for my case (eg Vantec), which allows me to remove the backup drive or just power it off from the mobile rack.
3) Wire in a power switch for the drive. Cheap, easy, simple.
4) Get an external enclosure that has a power switch on it.
Out of those choices, I would probably choose 3), just because it is cheap and I'm not adding more components that have potential for noise (like the mobile rack that has a fan in it).
It is occurring on my Dell Studio XP - running Win7 Pro. Intel� Core™ i5 CPU 650 @ 3.20GHz.
I'm trying to back up to ext hdd. But however I connect one, I mean to whichever usb port, win explorer fails to pick it up. Although the machine does play a sound so I would have thought it would be recognising it at some level.
The problem is not the hdd. I've tried with two different hdds both of which work with other desktops.
This morning I tried the troubleshooter from Control Panel. Result (copied from troubleshooting report) was as follows:
Issues found Hardware changes might not have been detectedHardware changes might not have been detected Detected Scan for recent hardware changes Completed
Potential issues that were checked Windows Update configured to never install driversWindows Update configured to never install drivers Driver updates aren't automatically installed when detected by Windows Update. Issue not present
My computer just likes to crash. I haven't run into any way to repeat any of these, and there's no common factors. This has been happening for months, and I've been able to stand it until now. I'm just sick of never having a working computer. Hundreds of blue screens, at least 6 different error codes over the last 6 months. I've attached the latest few.The last problem I had with this computer was a rash of BSODs every few minutes, rendering my computer completely inoperable. It was bad caps on an old motherboard, which forced me to upgrade my mobo, CPU and RAM; that was done Sep 23 last year. I've still been getting a few lately, so I tried switching to an older hard drive I have on hand, which helped some, but didn't solve the problem completely. Here's the specs as of now.
Win 7 64 bit Brand new case with two big fans to hopefully rule out overheating Gigabyte GA-880GA-UD3H AMD 955 Sector 5 DDR3 8GB Rebranded MSI Nvidia 9500 GT Secondhand PSU, 480W or 550W, don't remember which (suspected cause) Drives: Western Digital 40gig IDE (current boot drive ) Secondhand Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB SATA (problem child) Generic IDE DVD R/RW
Yes, I know, it's weird mixup of parts that could run a lot better with newer hardware. That's what happens when you take what you can get and spend money only when you have to. I don't have money to throw at this stupid thing, money is in short supply. So don't just say, "buy a brand new this, that and the other and your troubles will be over," unless that is the ONLY option to fix this. I simply can't afford it.
EDIT TO ADD:A short list of codes and associated files I've gotten in the last couple BSODs, just for quick review and in no specific order:
Because of the ntfs.sys being a common factor, I suspect the hard drives, but I'm also wondering if it's not something else,because this happens with two different drives, one IDE, the other SATA.Also, the errors below are from both drives, both with Win 7 installed. The perfmon was run on the IDE drive, as the SATA drive is too unstable to run reliably for 30 minutes.
I've done some searching for this and found some similar issues but nothing fits exactly what I'm trying to do. I have been running Vista Ult. 64 bit for a little over a year and have loved it. It solved all the problems I had with XP Pro 32 bit on my hardware. I bought 7 Pro 64 bit through www.theultimatesteal.com since I'm taking some night classes. I forgot I couldn't upgrade from Ult.
to Pro so I had to do a clean install, which I did, on a separate drive. I have five drives in my system, C, D, and E are all 1TB while F and G are 1.5TB. C is where Vista is installed and G is where 7 is located. I'll be going back and forth between the OS's until I get everything the way I want it.
At that point I want to remove Vista and have 7 be the only OS. But I do not want to migrate the install onto the 1TB C: drive, I want to keep it on the 1.5TB drive but have it recognized as the C: drive. The install was done from within Vista from the download since my physical media has not yet arrived. So even when I boot into 7, it is seen as being installed on the G: drive; it did not make itself the C: drive.
So I'll need to get rid of Vista, get 7 to see itself as being the C: drive, get rid of the boot menu, and swap the drives and cables around to put my 7 install at the head of the HDD pack. I've already done a full system backup of my Vista install with Acronis TIH 2010. How do I need to go about this? On another note; why did MS only offer home and pro through ultimate steal? They offered Vista Ultimate. I mean, it is called ULTIMATE steal, not Pro steal afterall, and it would have made the upgrade process that much easier.
I want to combine my 2 desktops into one, since I never use both together and the older one is very dated by now (think Time/tiny computers old). My current machine is an Asus P5Q-E with a C2D and has one HDD on a SATA connection running windows 7 64bit. The old computer is a single core Athlon 2700+ thing with a pair of hard drives on a single IDE ribbon.What I want to do is put the hard drives from the old machine into the newer and be able to choose between Windows XP already installed on the old master IDE hard drive and Windows 7 on the newer SATA drive (I've only kept the old computer to run XP for compatibility), all the while keeping the old slave IDE drive as a slave.
I have 4 internal HDDs and have had this setup for about 2 months now. I had to reformat my computer this week and have since been having a problem with my hard drives. While I am browsing folders and occasionally even using programs, my HDDs will seize up for around 5-10 seconds. One of the drives starts to make some loading noises and then eventually they begin to work again. While this is happening I can usually use the GUI that is loaded and most things loaded into RAM, however I cannot access the HDD for anything new.One of the internal drives was originally an external drive, the Seagate FreeAgent 500GB. I suspect it may be the culprit here. I was having this exact same problem before with it; whenever I'd plug it in through USB, even if accessing another drive, I'd have the computer seize up and have to wait for it to finish making similar sounding loading noises. Removing it from the case and plugging it in internally fixed the issue completely, until I reformatted this week. I have checked all the cache options for the drives and they are all set the same; default which is just the top option checked off. I did this as I suspected that the Seagate drive is set with the same cache options as it did when external, but it's not the case.
I have one HDD C: with Windows 7 64bit and another HDD from my previous dual boot PC with two partitions C: and E:, both winX pro.How is it possible to combine both HDDs, creating a multi boot system having as C: my Windows 7 drive?
So I tried installing Windows on my new machine and did waht seemed to be the recommended thing and plugged in only my SSD into the Sata port, leaving my other drives unplugged until after the installation. Everything went fine and I was able to get Windows 7 up, drivers were installing and everything was peachy, but Then I plugged in my other drives, and when I did so with the computer running Windows immediately recognized them and I could access them, as well as do whatever I wanted. However when I restarted I got the message BOOTMGR is missing.
Now, you may be thinking that this is a simple issue of it trying to load from one of those other HDDs, just set the boot order in the BIOS blah blah. But its not. I set the boot order in the BIOS to use the SSD, I set the SSD to the top of the list within the HDDS priority order and still nothing. I then took it a step further and instead of selecting the order manually told it to boot from the SSD flat out, boot from this drive and the same error message came up. I already did the boot from Windows disc, startup repair thing - didn't work.
I have just installed a new P5G41T-M LX Series motherboard and two DDR3 x 2GB replacing DDR2. During startup a message says BOOTMGR is missing, press Ctrl Alt Delete to restart, on restart the same message is repeated.
