Booting 2 hard drives?

[GoGeTa006]

I have a new hard drive, 640 gigs SATA.
I had my old IDE hard drive with windows vista 32 installed and everything was fine
I recently installed windows 7 in the new hard drive.

Whenever I boot up the computer, if I place the SATA disk as first priority in the hard drive boot-menu the system halts wiht an error "could not find boot file (i dont remember the name of the file but it contains boot in it)
so I have to boot from the first disc and then select windows 7 to start.

I wanted to format the old hard drive to use it as an anime storage hard drive.

If i format it (i suppose) the computer wont be able to start anymore?

[Slykester]

Remove your old drive, boot into the recovery environment and run fixboot or the built in auto-recover.

[kureshii]

Have you enabled the boot flag on the new disk yet? Is the MBR formatted correctly on it?

Also, yay for amazingly descriptive thread titles.

[vuzedome]

Plug out the other hard disk when installing Windows.
When everything's done, unplug the new one and plug in the old one, try booting in. Success, move on.
Plug in both new and old, try booting into each one.

[GoGeTa006]

so basically just reinsall windows without the other ahrd drive plugged in?

[psyren]

2 options:
You cannot configure your BIOS properly, or;
Your BIOS is retarded.

[fohfoh]

You should be able to change which HDD you boot. Don't know how? Just do it manually for the first few times via Bios.

OR.

Load ONLY your old HDD, get something like GParted or something and wipe that shit clean. (AFAIK, windows doesn't allow you to delete windows file components even if it's not on the primary HDD.)

Go back and have your backed up shit ready and load onto the old one.

[bloody000]

The bootloader is on your old drive's MBR.
Connect ONLY your new drive, then use the recovery functions on the Win7 disc.
After that connect all drives and tell your BIOS to boot from your new drive first, should work.

[kureshii]

You might need to enable to boot flag on the second HDD as well (can be done using GParted too.) Win7 recovery will probably do this for you, I think.

[Xiong Chiamiov]

The bootloader is on your old drive's MBR.
Connect ONLY your new drive, then use the recovery functions on the Win7 disc.
After that connect all drives and tell your BIOS to boot from your new drive first, should work.

IIRC, fixmbr does this, but don't take my word on it.

[vuzedome]

Do what I mentioned, and just go into the boot menu during startup and choose which drive you want to boot into.

[billlanam]

You installed Windows 7 as an upgrade (the default when one HD has an older Windows version and you're installing onto a different HD), ending up with a dual boot system, it can be fixed by reinstalling without the original HD plugged in, or with it in, though it is harder to set it up that way.

It is easier to just keep it the way it is, since it doesn't hurt anything, you can set the boot manager to automatically boot Windows 7 after a delay.

[GoGeTa006]

You installed Windows 7 as an upgrade (the default when one HD has an older Windows version and you're installing onto a different HD), ending up with a dual boot system, it can be fixed by reinstalling without the original HD plugged in, or with it in, though it is harder to set it up that way.

It is easier to just keep it the way it is, since it doesn't hurt anything, you can set the boot manager to automatically boot Windows 7 after a delay.

its doing that. . .but as i mentioned i want to completely erase the original hard drive that contains the boot file. . .

ill try using the win7 disc. . .
thnkz