SSD and HDD Boot Sector Problem with 2 Win 7 OSs

[General_T]

Hi,

My problem is as follows:

I installed Windows 7 onto an SSD and used this for about 7 months - everthing working well. I recently decided that I needed more storage space so I added on a 1TB internal HDD and put Windows 7 on this drive as well.

So now when I boot up I get a choice of 2 Windows 7 OS to choose from - one on the SSD and one on the new HDD. I decided that I didn't want to have the SSD drive anymore (too small) so I removed it from the computer - thinking (apparently naively) that the other HDD would work fine.

This was not the case. With the SSD removed I cannot boot up the computer - apparently the other Windows 7 OS on the HDD does not contain any boot info for the BIOS. It seems that only the SSD has the boot info?

I had to reinstall the SSD back into the computer in order to be able to boot to the other Windows 7 OS on the HDD.

So my question is - how do I remove the SSD and still be able to boot to the other internal HDD Windows 7 OS?

I have included a picture of my HDs from Computer Management (there are also 2 data drives on the system.

Appreciate any insight into this problem.


Thanks

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[General_T]

Did you winstall windows on the other HDD ?
If so the easy and faster way is to connect that drive alone on the computer and run the windows instalation disk to run the recovery console or whatever it is called and repair the instalation. Recent versions of windows have a "wizard" that will easly fix any boot problem assuming the drive is ok and the windows is installed on the disk.
The picture provided shows that only one of your partitions have a boot record (Disk2 - Windows 7 c:) the other instance of "windows" on Disk 3 only shows an active partition without boot sector to boot when the drive is installed alone on the system.

Hi,

Thank You for replying.

Yes. Windows 7 is on the HDD I recently installed. I did try disconnecting all the other drives from the mobo and just boot with that new HDD (with Windows 7 on it - the OS I am using right now to type this message). The system would not boot and I did spend a good deal of time using the repair feature of WinRE with no luck. I would always get a message of "missing Boot Manager" error. As I mentioned, I know the disk is fine as I am using it right now.

One thing of note is that although in the BIOS the HDD is among the bootable drives listed, in the BIOS SATA listings this HDD does not appear? And in the Windows Repair it never shows an OS when I only have this HDD attached?

Is it possible that the Windows picture shows that there is a boot sector on it only because I chose it as the drive I wanted to boot to and not because it actually contains the boot info (I believe it is kept on the SSD drive instead?)