Bootloader is on the wrong drive

ummduh

Member
I've got 2 drives in my system, a SATA which I always used as the boot drive, and a IDE drive for storage.

In my BIOS the SATA drive is configured to be the 1st drive, then the IDE is 2nd (boot order)

Somehow when I installed Win7 it configured the IDE drive to be the primary boot drive, even though it installed itself onto the correct drive.

So I had to change the BIOS to reflect the IDE to be 1st, otherwise I got the to ntldr error.

I was hoping I could fix this without a reinstall. I had the installer dvd in the drive for a while being to lazy to take it out, and of course this hid the problem until I had a ton of stuff reinstalled.

So basically, I need to move the bootloader from 1 drive to the other. Possible?

I was thinking to disconnect the IDE drive and then run something to fix the bootloader, this should put the bootloader where it belongs, shouldn't it?
 
Hi Um, welcome to NST
If you disconnect the IDE and boot the W7 DVD / "repair your computer" / "startup repair" 2 or 3 times, you should reinstall the boot on the W7 partition and you can put it first in the boot sequence and remove the secret one from your IDE.
 
So I had to change the BIOS to reflect the IDE to be 1st, otherwise I got the to ntldr error.
You must have XP installed on your system, if you get an ntldr error. NTLDR is the XP bootloader. So if you have XP installed on your system, and you want to dual-boot, you will need to make sure the files NTLDR, NTTDETECT.COM, and boot.ini are on your "system" "active" partition, and the boot.ini is pointing at the drive and partition XP's installed to. If you get EasyBCD 2.0 Beta, which has a built-in boot.ini configurator, you can use it to add a new XP entry to your Win 7 boot menu, and hit Yes when you get the message asking you if you want to let it auto-configure boot.ini for you.

Jake
 
I was able to unplug the IDE drive, and boot into the Win7 repair section (on the DVD) and reload the bootloader onto the correct disk. It took 2 reboots for it to do it properly.

Thanks for the help.

btw, the IDE drive has had a host of different OS's on it.. The previous OS was XP, probably why I was geting the ntldr error? Eh.. it's over.
 
Glad it's OK now.
Quite often old HDDs being used for data or backup have an XP IPL sitting quietly in the MBR from a previous life as system volume. It does absolutely nothing for years until a problem with the other HDD makes the BIOS look further down its boot sequence, and suddenly an XP error message leaps out of a Vista system. A search back through the old threads will reveal a number of users puzzled by similar events.
 
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