Windows 7 option disappeared?

cmonster

Member
Hello. Last night I was playing around with my hard drives... well actually just unplugging one device at a time(while turned off, of course) in trying to figure out the noisy culprit which has been bugging me for awhile now. I've done this in the past and I had some more time so I went at it again last night.

I went to bed after giving up and when I turned on the computer today the boot option was simply gone and the computer only boots in my XP partition.

Checking the EasyBSD shortly after, the Windows 7 entry was missing and everything seemed to be back to its default settings, complete with the "Earlier version of Windows" entry instead.

I've tried manually adding the Windows 7 entry but the boot menu still doesn't show up and also tried iRebooting, as well.

I'm sure it's a minor problem but I simply can't get my head around it. Thanks for reading.
 
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Switch the boot sequence in the BIOS or physically swap the drives in the system until you get it back the way it was.
 
Could that be done with partitions? Windows XP and Windows 7 are both on the same hard drive. I should've made that clear, my apologies.
 
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Wow, one problem after another. I think I might've made this more complicated.

After going through the steps in the link you've provided, nothing really changed other than the computer now freezing at the Windows XP logo. I got into safe mode and attempted to fix the bootloader via EasyBCD, hoping that might help(probably a big mistake). Now I can't boot into XP as it tells me that the \Windows\system32\winload.exe is missing or corrupted.

[edit]

Actually, I finally got it to boot Windows 7 after running the Windows 7 starup recovery several times. All that's left is to make it boot XP that I screwed up.
 
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Everything is working now thanks to all you guys' help!

Could anyone explain to me what possibly corrupted the boot files for Windows 7? I'm planning on doing some more tests for noisy components, most likely plugging hard drives in and out again, and I would like to avoid whatever I did that was wrong.

Thanks for all your help, guys!
 
Glad to help. It isnt that the boot was corrupted, its just you had the drives out of order. The repairs you've made have simply made the new drive you are booting from bootable on its own.
 
Sorry but I'm a bit confused and need more details, if you don't mind. I didn't really do anything other than take out the power plugs from the hard drive and turned on the computer to check the noise level for each individual drive. Would doing that mess up the boot order, as well?

If so, I guess I can just unplug all the SATA cables first before turning on my computer so the computer doesn't see any drives, yes?
 
When you remove the drive that's first in the BIOS boot sequence and start the PC, the system will boot from the next HDD in the sequence (if it can).
Most BIOS routines will then make that drive first in the sequence even when you plug the original HDD back in again.
So by removing a disk and placing it back again, you can permanently change the BIOS boot sequence. All you needed to have done was go into the BIOS setup utility as you switch on the PC and put the original disk back at the top of the boot sequence and everything would have been working just the way it used to.
What you've now done is create a new set of boot files on the other disk, leaving it permanently top of the boot sequence surplanting the old top of the heap.
 
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