Windows 7 Sata SSD & Sata II 2TB Hard Drive problem. PLEASE Help!

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KeyLee19

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Mar 27, 2010
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So, I just built a new computer and I put it all together and installed windows on my Sata III SSD Hard drive. After installation I noticed I accidentally put my other hard drive (Sata II 2TB Hard Drive) in the sata 3 slot also along with the other. Now I have a problem where it doesn't show my 2TB as a hard drive in my computer. I go to computer management and then Disk Management and it shows my 2TB hard drive but it is not assigned a Drive letter and it says System Reserved 1863.01GB NTFS Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partion) IT will not let me delete the drive and reinstall it or I can't format it or partion it or anything. My question is how do I get it removed from reserved so I can use it as a normal hard drive. Also, a second problem I have is after the installation of windows I turned the computer off and moved the 2TB hard drive that was accidentally plugged into Sata III to Sata II and when the computer was turned on and loading windows it came up with an error saying somethin to the effect of cannot find boot manager. please press control+alt+delete to restart. Problem is when this happens my keyboard or nothing else works so I have to hard restart the computer... before that message comes up when its showing the motherboard screen I can go into bios and setup.. I change the Primary boot as the SSD drive (which windows is installed to) and it still doesnt load windows. the only way I could get it to reload into windows is if I have my windows 7 PRO CD in the CD-ROM or if the primary boot was A: which is floppy (no floppy drive installed in my computer.) How do I fix these as I am new to Windows 7.

-Thanks in advance!

Computer Specs.-
Windows 7 Pro 64bit
Motherboard- GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD5
Sata III SSD- Crucial RealSSD C300 CTFDDAC128MAG
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148348&cm_re=sata_III_ssd-_-20-148-348-_-Product
Sata II HDD- Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EADS 2TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136344
 

atym

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What's happened is that when you were installing Windows, at the point where it says "The Installer May Make Extra Partitions..." your installer has found your HDD, effectively drive number 2, and has chosen to put the System Reserved partition (~100mb) on that drive in the misguided attempt to speed system performance (this way would be logical if both drives were of the same caliber).

Your HDD has the System Reserved partition - not your SSD - which is used as the bootdisk (the data that tells what files are where when it comes time to load Windows). Now that you've removed the HDD, your computer has no info to boot with.

1. Put the HDD back where it was, load Windows, backup, get ready to re-install Windows.

2. Remove (or just unplug) your HDD

3. Upon powering up your PC, hit Del or whatever to get to your BIOS menu. Now at the BIOS settings screen make sure that "First Hard Drive" is set to your SSD (by default it will point to first HDD).

4. Go through the install process as normal, just without your HDD installed (for now). Windows' installer will then make that small system partition on your SSD (along with C: and any others you specify).

Once Windows has installed and you've made sure it boots up fine, turn it off and throw that HDD back in there (in the SATA2 port this time). Once you've booted back into Windows, use the Administrative Tools' Disk Management module to (re)format and utilize that drive.

Now that installation of Windows is dependent on only one disk: your SSD. Problem solved!

(This has been tried and tested on a machine exactly the same as the specs you quoted - I hit the same snag myself the first time round).

--atym

(Edit 1: Spelling and punctuation corrections.)
 
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