How did this happen? Better yet: How do I fix it?

[TechyJosh]

Hello all,

I am hoping that you can help me out because I am at a loss for explanation or solution, and I can't seem to find anyone else with a similar problem.

I recently built a PC for heavyduty backups of my systems.
My intent was to have an 80GB Hard drive in there for the OS and swap out a couple of 1TB Hard drives for the backups to save to and store the files.

Here's where my problem comes: After I installed Windows Vista Ultimate onto the 80GB HDD I trid to format my first 1TB (It was previously in a Seagate FreeAgent enclosure and I did not want the Seagaate backup software) but when I tried to format it windows said that it could not perform a system formatof the disk.
"No big deal" I thought "I'll move it over to my other station and format it there."
Well after I pulled the 1TB Drive out of the new station I started the new station up again to fiddle around with a few settings.
And it wouldn't start up. Non-system disk error. I couldn't figure out why, luckily thought I had been too focused on this to start the format of the 1TB drive, so on a whim I plugged the 1TB back into the unit and it was happy.

So to the best of my knowledge I figure that I must have somehow gotten the MBR written onto the 1TB HDD.

I had no idea that this was even possible and I have no clue how to move the MBR from one disk to another, if anyone could please help me out I would greatly appreciate it.

And if anyone has any idea of the why this happend I would love to know that as well.

 

[Paperdoc]

How do you know where you installed Vista? If you had both HDD's installed in the machine at the time Vista was installed, it could have used either, and would have asked you to tell it which. From what you say, the installation may have been done entirely on the 1 TB unit.

On the other hand, Windows does one odd thing I cannot recall just now. If you DO install to one specific HDD in a system with two HDD units inside, the installation system will set up a special set of files for a system particular purpose - I don't remember what - on the OTHER drive. Then if you try to run without it it gives you real trouble!

Sorry I can't remember all the details. You may find them on Tom's somewhere. But onwards to: How to FIX? Simplest procedure may be to remove the 1 TB unit then re-install Vista on the ONLY (80 GB) drive in the machine. When you do this, as a first step use the Install system menus to Delete all Partitions on that drive and start with an empty HDD.

After the re-installed Vista is in place, you can add in the 1 TB unit. Then use Disk Management to Delete any Partitions on it, Create one or more new ones, and Format it (them). Make sure in BIOS Setup that the Boot Priority Sequence does not try to use the 1 TB unit to boot from.

 

[sminlal]

When you install Vista or Windows 7 they create a 100MB "Recovery Partition" in addition to the main partition that holds the OS. The system actually boots to the recovery partition and then loads the OS from the main partition. The rationale is that if your main OS partition gets trashed you can still use the tools in the recovery partition to repair your installation.

The problem is that if there are multiple disks in the system with free space on them then the install program puts the recovery partition onto a different disk than the main OS partition, and it doesn't really tell you that it's doing this.

To avoid this, I make sure that only the OS drive is connected to the machine whenever do a Windows installation.

There may be a simpler way to solve your problem, but what I'd probably do in your situation is to disconnect everything except for the OS drive and re-install Windows onto it as Paperdoc described.

 

[Paperdoc]

Me, I have not got around to "updating" (read, installing) Win 7 from XP. So i appreciate the knowledge from sminlal. With that in mind it will be easy to do the new install with ONLY one disk connected, then add other HDD's afterward.