Removing secondary HDD Vista Wont Boot

[thebatfink]

Hi,

I have 2 x SATA drives in my PC. One contains the Vista installation and one is used for storage. I have run out of disk space on my storage drive and I'm trying to swap it for a larger one. My problem is when I remove the storage drive Vista no longer boots. I have been advised that there are boot files on my second HDD needed for Vista and I need to copy these over? Is that correct?

In the Disk Management program I have my installation drive saying -

Volume C is listed as - Healthy (Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)

My secondary storage drive is saying -

Volume D is listed as - Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition)

Volume D is what I am trying to remove so I can put in a larger HDD (my case only accepts 2 x drives).

I have downloaded EASYBCD but I'm reluctant to start plugging away making changes I'm unsure about so if anyone could provide any help, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your time,
Batfink

 

[Terry60]

Hi Batfink. welcome to NST.
The "system" flag on your D:\ disk indicates the presence of the boot files.
With the D:\ disk removed,
boot your Vista DVD, select "repair your computer" (bottom left) then "startup repair" from the next screen.
Do the whole of the green sentence over again as many times as it takes for the repair to reinstate the whole of the boot process on your C:\ disk, and the C:\ disk becomes bootable itself. (probably 2 or 3 times in total - it's very stupid and only does one thing per pass)
When C:\ is booting you'll see it has boot,system and active flags all present. You can then put your larger disk in.