Booting From a New Hard Drive

[ravioliiiii]

Hello Everyone,

I installed my new SATA hard drive today. Now I have my old IDE and the new SATA. After creating a partition and formatting the new drive, I ran MagicDisc from my old hard drive and installed Windows 7 on the new hard drive (I tried cloning, but it was going to take a day, and I don't have much that needed to transfer over).

Now whenever I turn my computer on, it asks me which Windows 7 I want to choose. The first option is the one on my new SATA and the second option is the one on my IDE.

How can I change my BIOS settings to make the SATA boot first, and then ultimately use my IDE hard drive as extra storage? I pressed F12 and went to the boot menu, and when I chose the Primary SATA to boot, it asked me to retry or choose something else. Then it took me back to the screen where I get to choose which Windows 7 installation to open.

 

[Captain Pooka]

Boot in to the correct Windows 7. Go to Start>Run

Type in msconfig. Go to the Boot tab. There will be two OSes there, delete the second one (assuming that's the IDE one). Problem solved

-Q

 

[ravioliiiii]

Thanks! Now when I try to format my old IDE drive, Windows doesn't let me. How can I delete everything on that drive and ultimately use it as extra space? Does it have anything to do with it still being characterized as a "master" drive in my BIOS?

 

[Indigo]

Do it from disk management. Click Start, RIGHT click "Computer" and choose "manage" then click on the disk management subcategory on the left. Locate the drive and right click on it, "delete volume" will be the easiest way to force a format (eventually) on the drive while Windows thinks it still has files open on it. If it doesn't work, make sure the drive isn't being used as a page file source. Otherwise, once you delete the volume, you can then format it.

 

[ravioliiiii]

I will definitely do that tomorrow morning. If it doesn't work how do I find out if the old drive is being used as a file source? And if it is being used as one, how do I change it?Thanks.

 

[Indigo]

If you can, buy one of those SATA/PATA to USB dongles. Then it'll never be an issue again, as you can just plug it into the dongle and then connect it to USB, and the drive will show up as an external drive instead, and Windows usually doesn't place system files on detachable drives at all.

If you can't get one of those, grab the computerforums or Hirens boot CD and boot into the XP Mode and you can format the drive from there if the computer management method doesn't work.

 

[ravioliiiii]

I might buy one of those USB dongles og is talking about. What concerns me is this: when I go into my BIOS and turn off the Master IDE, my computer won't boot the new SATA with windows 7. It's as if the new SATA depends on the old IDE to boot up. Would I need to do something about that before I wipe out my old IDE drive?

 

[Captain Pooka]

You need to make sure the SATA drive is your primary boot device. It should pick up anyway, but I've read that it doesn't always...

 

[Indigo]

The other thing is that even though the BIOS says Master IDE, the Primary SATA can be tied to that same controller (by way of an onboard bridge chip) try enabling the master IDE again and disconnect the drive, then try booting to the SATA. If it works, disable the IDE again and try booting. If it doesn't work after that, you'll know that your board has the bridge chip.