Can't remove slave drive without boot fail

[killerzuchini]

Hi there people. This is an odd case that I can't quite figure out myself. I installed Windows Vista on my primary drive (SATA 1tb seagate drive) and had a storage drive (250gb IDE western digital) just chillin' in there. Now, everything runs fine and dandy, but it seems that during the vista install, it, for some reason, installed stuff onto the IDE drive. If I remove the IDE drive, vista won't boot. Now, the SATA -IS- the boot drive, is the main drive, and Vista IS installed on this drive. The IDE drive just has a folder called Programs ---> Microsoft, and then some random stuff buried in it. I want to remove the slave drive from my system, as it is no longer needed (was transferring all the data off of it). Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[pat]

remove it, then run a repair install of vista.

 

[killerzuchini]

Would the repair install remove any data, or JUST overwrite vista?

 

[pat]

overwrite vista, leaving programs installed.. everything should work as it was before. but the repair will fix the booting problem

 

[aford10]

^+1 @ Pat