Hard drive doesnt recognize Win 7 without old hard drive

[Yahko]

Hello there,

So i'm having problems with my two hard drives. I bought a new PC with a new hard drive and put both the old and the new one in. I installed Win 7 64 bit on the new hard drive ( I made 3 partitions - 1 for Windows, 2 for Media and 3 for games) said to myself to keep the old hard drive for miscellaneous stuff like old movies and old music and stuff I dont really care for.

The problem is when I took out the old hard drive out, the pc didnt recognize the new hard drive and the windows on it. So I installed a Win 7 32 bit on the Media partition. Now when I put the old hard drive back (if was formatted and emplty) and chose to reboot from it - my original Win 7 appeared for some wired reason. Now if I try to reboot from my new hard drive it opens up the New Win 7 32 bit windows.

To sum up my confusing situation - its like my new hard drive needs the old one to start my windows I originally installed. If i take the old hard drive out and try to start the new hard drive it doesnt see the Win 7 I normally use.

I checked to see for jumpers on both hard drives, there are not any.

Old hard drive is a Western Digital 2000 - 180 giga (has the old connection)

The new one is Seagate 950 Giga (has the new connection)

Thanks in advance - I will try to provide as much info possible if anyone needs more information.

Yahko.

 

[RealBeast]

It sounds like perhaps your SRP (system reserved partition) is on the old drive. I would get the computer to boot up with whatever drives it needs and then make a system repair disc -- just type that in the run box window and follow the wizard, then start up with only the new disk drive and the repair CD in the drive and fix the issue. Also, check your bios boot setting to insure that the primary boot drive is the new HDD.

 

[jonjonjon]

before you make the cd see if you can just get into the recovery options. hit F8 when its booting and select 'Repair your computer'. then try 'Startup repair'.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/What-are-the-system-recovery-options-in-Windows-7

 

[Yahko]

I would try to do that and keep you updated.

 

[Yahko]

before you make the cd see if you can just get into the recovery options. hit F8 when its booting and select 'Repair your computer'. then try 'Startup repair'.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/What-are-the-system-recovery-options-in-Windows-7

I used my Win 7 CD, rebooted from it and did repair system and now it shows the windows properly and I took the old Hard drive out and everything works perfect. Thanks a million.

 

[Hawkeye22]

In the future, install windows with only one drive in the system - the drive you want to install the OS to. After the OS is up and running, then attach remaining drives. This will prevent the situation you just put yourself into.

During the win 7 install onto the new drive, windows detected a boot loader on the old drive and just updated it. When you removed the old drive, you no longer have a boot loader. doing a windows repair like others suggested should force windows create or fix the boot loader.

 

[Yahko]

In the future, install windows with only one drive in the system

I never realized that I thought if I install Windows and I just pick the hard drive I want and then it would automatically do the boot loader on it, not on the old one that had been formatted.