[ColdRush]

Heres the problem:

I have 2 sata drives in this box right now. It boots up just fine with them both in their respective spots. I have a windows xp sata in the first slot, and a windows 7 in the second slot.

If I try to switch the windows 7 sata to the first sata spot, I can't boot. If I boot with only the windows 7 sata in, it won't boot. But if I keep it in this order(winxp, win7)...it works?

Is there some master/slave sata thing going on here? How do I make the win7 sata bootable? I installed from a second dvd drive while in winxp, which I also cant boot from.

 

[jfizz84]

yea sounds like u have to setup them up for master and slave boot, or maybe in the bios the primary boot device is set to the xp hard drive first

 

[ColdRush]

I cant find it though...I'll brb I'm gonna check in the bios again.

 

[LemonSlice]

Which OS did you install first? And what OS did you install onto the 2nd drive? If you installed 7 onto the second drive after, the bootloader is written to the first drive with entries for Windows XP and 7. If you try booting physically from the second drive, it has no bootloader, so you can not boot it.

EDIT: If you want to be able to boot to the Windows 7, unplug all the other drives and use the disc to run a Startup Repair. It will rewrite the bootloader to the disk that physically has windows 7 on it.

 

[ColdRush]

Quote:

Originally Posted by LemonSlice Which OS did you install first? And what OS did you install onto the 2nd drive? If you installed 7 onto the second drive after, the bootloader is written to the first drive with entries for Windows XP and 7. If you try booting physically from the second drive, it has no bootloader, so you can not boot it. EDIT: If you want to be able to boot to the Windows 7, unplug all the other drives and use the disc to run a Startup Repair. It will rewrite the bootloader to the disk that physically has windows 7 on it.

I installed winxp on the first drive, and installed win7 on the second using the winxp drive. I can't boot from my dvd drive because my primary drive is a cdr drive(How do I make my dvd drive my primary drive?). I cant startup repair unless I can boot from my dvd drive, which I can't.

 

[Unaufhaltsam]

You can download the Windows 7 recovery disc from here. You can burn it to a cd and then try what LemonSlice said about unplugging the other drive and running startup repair. If that works you'll need to add XP back using easybcd or a program like that. Or manually.

 

[LemonSlice]

If you unplug the CD drive it should be able to boot from the DVD, provided they are SATA. If they are IDE, arrange it so the DVD is Master (usually black) and CD as slave (usually gray). The recovery disc linked by unaufhaltsam should work as well.