computer cannot find boot device

[heero yuy]

i left my comptuer on yesterday to download some stuff on steam

came down this morning and there was a black screen with a flashing white _ (or -)

i restarted the computer and it said it couldnt find anything to boot from and something about insert boot media and press any key

i had a look in the BIOS both hard drives were there i booted the computer into a linux live CD and the hard drive that had windows 7 installed on was ok

any idea as to whats happened?

 

[plaintuts]

Laptop?

 

[EasyLover]

Random behaviour. Unplug and then plug again the power and data cables of both HDDs and check.

 

[heero yuy]

^ did that didn't work

just shoved things from the smaller driver onto the larger 1tb drive (windows was on the 1tb drive because I got the 500gig one after I installed windows last) after deleting the un needed stuff and installed windows to the 500gig hard drive

its now going on about something .exe being corrupt when I try to boot so I am now downloading windows 7 again and will be burning that to dvd just in case there is an issue with the disc I have if that does not work I'm going to take it into my local computer shop

the broken thing is \windows\system32\winload.exe

 

[EasyLover]

Seems like a corrupt/missing file. If you've backup of the previous installation. Just repair the windows or restore the backup from it.

 

[heero yuy]

apparently installing windows 7 on a system with more than one hard drive can cause issues

so I unplugged the data drive and re-installed and everything works perfectly now (apart from the fact everything is really really slow I'm busy trying to copy bits across from an external drive and going into the folders takes about 5 seconds to load on all the drives)