Did I screw up the installation?

akumati · Aug 22, 2016

I just got back from getting my PC deep cleaned from a local PC shop, and the people informed me that because I had installed Windows 7 on my PC while 2 harddrives were connected into it (1 an SSD and the other a harddisk), that something with the boot patrons were allocated into both drives.

They informed me this would only give me minor issues from time to time, but I'm curious. 1: How do I find out that my boot sectors are messed up and 2: Will this actually cause any form of issues for me? Because personally outside of a few GPU crashed here and there (Which I'm hoping are unrelated), I've noticed no issue. I don't exactly remember what they told me either, because this is the first time I heard of anything like this.

ss202sl · Aug 22, 2016

There's a hidden boot partition(created during install) that by default will go on a hdd(if it can). Normally you want this on the SSD along with windows - so you unplug the HDD during install forcing this hidden partition to go onto the SSD.

SuperSoph_WD · Aug 23, 2016

akumati :

Hey there, @akumati!

It's very common for an OS confusion to occur, so the guys from the PC repair shop are basically right. However, it's not necessarily happening every time you have more than 1 SATA device connected to the motherboard. Sometimes, Windows installs correctly to the destination drive (in your case - the SSD), without randomly scattering the system files across both the SSD & HDD. You can check if everything is okay with yours by unplugging the secondary HDD from the system and attempt to boot without having the drive in the system. If it boots up fine, then there are no OS-essential files stored on it (which would mean that you have avoided the OS confusion). You can also check Disk Management to see how both drives appear there and what kind and how many system/boot partitions are stored on each.

The worst thing about OS confusion is that it doesn't allow you to boot properly if you have the secondary HDD unplugged from the system. Either way, you can always run the Windows Repair Options from the installation media and fix the master boot record.

Hope this helped you. Let us know if you have more questions!

SuperSoph_WD

akumati · Aug 23, 2016

SuperSoph_WD :

akumati :

Hey there, @akumati!

It's very common for an OS confusion to occur, so the guys from the PC repair shop are basically right. However, it's not necessarily happening every time you have more than 1 SATA device connected to the motherboard. Sometimes, Windows installs correctly to the destination drive (in your case - the SSD), without randomly scattering the system files across both the SSD & HDD. You can check if everything is okay with yours by unplugging the secondary HDD from the system and attempt to boot without having the drive in the system. If it boots up fine, then there are no OS-essential files stored on it (which would mean that you have avoided the OS confusion). You can also check Disk Management to see how both drives appear there and what kind and how many system/boot partitions are stored on each.

The worst thing about OS confusion is that it doesn't allow you to boot properly if you have the secondary HDD unplugged from the system. Either way, you can always run the Windows Repair Options from the installation media and fix the master boot record.

Hope this helped you. Let us know if you have more questions!

SuperSoph_WD

Thank you for the answer sir.

I'll give windows repair a shot, and if it doesn't fix anything then i'll try a bootup without the HDD.

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Did I screw up the installation?

akumati

Honorable

SuperSoph_WD

ss202sl

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SuperSoph_WD

Glorious

akumati

Honorable

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