Issue with Windows 7 installation

eyvind

Member
Let me start by clarifying that I am rather experienced with computers, having built my own, installed windows 7 on several different computers as well as my own, setup OSX from vanilla, etc.

Today i tried to help a friend install windows 7 on his 3-4 year old Toshiba A200 laptop. The laptop comes with two 150 gig disks. First I tried removing all custom partitions, except the recovery partition. I selected Disk 0 for install, created a partition which covered the entire disk, and clicked continue. Once the setup completed, there was no booting when it restarted. Instead it skipped to ethernet boot. I restarted into the setup and ran repair, attempting to make the partition active, etc. (no 100mb partition was created). Eventually i managed to actually get an error saying BOOTMGR is missing.

Stumped, I tried reinstalling without creating a partition covering the whole of disk 0 (leaving a few gigs). Expecting the 100mb partition to be created automatically, i was surprised when it was not created during the formatting. Instead, when I clicked continue, it asked me if it wanted to create one.

Bingo, I thought, and continued. Eventually i restarted and ran into the same error. When I booted into setup, I realised that the 100mb partitino had been created on the DISK 1 (the second hard drive). I rebooted and tried to start windows from the Second HDD. Luckily this worked.

Except the problem is that my friend will have to keep selecting to change the boot to the second HDD every time he starts, which is annoying. (I cannot change the boot order, because sometime over the last 3 years a BIOS password was added, and my friend cant remember it).

For lucks sake, I tried what I did first again (creating a partition spanning the whole of disk 0) and installing. What I noticed was that if i create a partition on DISK 1, the setup will immediately ask me if I want to create and extra 100mb partition. If I do the same on DISK 0, nothing happens. Anyway, I did the first method again, without creating a 100mb partition. It didnt work yet again, so for the sake of it i tried booting from the second (completely empty and unformatted) partition. Voila - it works, even though nothing seems to be installed on it.

If i try to boot from the first disk (disk0) I get a bootmgr error.

To sum it up (if the top part was confusing) - the laptop only seems to be able to boot from Disk 1 (the second harddrive) regardless of where windows is installed. If windows is installed on teh first HD, you still need to boot from the second one to be able to start windows (even if it is empty).

Please comment and tell me if I should explain something better/more info.

Thanks

Eyvind
 
Get EasyBCD 2.0
Backup/Repair BCD > Change boot drive
point it to the W7 partition when it asks.
It will copy all the boot files into the W7 partition, from the place where you accidentally installed them.
(W7 setup likes to play "hide the boot files" if you let it allocate space itself. Far better to format the HDD into the configuration you want before the install starts, then just point it to the pre-formatted space. That way everything stays together)
Reboot.
 
Last edited:
Thanks

Thank you very much. The way the installation was acting up was indeed very strange - some sort of bug. It worked perfectly to use Easybcd
 
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