I'm something of a computer tech myself, and I'm not used to being stumped, but I am. I have two hard drives, both with Windows 7 Professional(SP1) installed. One of them is a small OS-only drive (55GB after OS), and the other is a normal 2TB drive. When I bought this computer(nearly a year ago), the previous owners booted from the small drive due to problems with the normal one. I fixed the problems with the normal one early on, but I continued just booting from the small one and using the normal one for storage/as an install/download path. Well, my computer has been blue screening a lot lately, for seemingly unknown reasons. It also glitches out with the graphics from time to time, which also causes a crash sometimes, and when booted back up, sometimes has a completely glitched out display, which can only be fixed with a manual shut down(hold the power button). Obviously you're not supposed to do that, as it can cause serious problems(corrupted files, etc). Well, I'm pretty sure that's what ended up happening. I couldn't get the small drive to boot up without an immediate blue screen on load, or glitched out display every single time it booted. So, I decided to start booting from the normal drive. The problem is this is a gaming computer, so obviously I use it for gaming. The normal drive apparently never had the NVIDIA driver installed, so none of my games can run. So, I downloaded and attempted to install the latest one. Every time, it either failed, or Windows wouldn't boot upon restart, forcing me to use a restore point at startup repair.
So, I decided to download a Windows 7 ISO and reinstall Windows on the small drive. Now here comes the full set of problems I'm now facing that have me stumped: No driver at all beyond a basic display and audio driver seem to be installed. Windows is supposed to come with a basic set of drivers, so that threw me for a loop. My NIC, my USBs, everything didn't work. My keyboard and mouse did, at firs, oddly enough since they're USB controlled. However, when I went to boot back up from my normal drive to find drivers, once I found them and rebooted back to the small drive, my keyboard and mouse stopped working. I can't even sign into Windows now on that drive due to having no keyboard or mouse control. As far as I know, installing drivers to a secondary drive you're not booted from is impossible, and if it isn't, then I have no idea how to do it.
My question is: Is it possible to install drivers to a secondary drive's OS without actually being booted from that drive? If not, then how the hell am I going to salvage this without throwing this computer in the trash/spending hundreds of dollars?
So, I decided to download a Windows 7 ISO and reinstall Windows on the small drive. Now here comes the full set of problems I'm now facing that have me stumped: No driver at all beyond a basic display and audio driver seem to be installed. Windows is supposed to come with a basic set of drivers, so that threw me for a loop. My NIC, my USBs, everything didn't work. My keyboard and mouse did, at firs, oddly enough since they're USB controlled. However, when I went to boot back up from my normal drive to find drivers, once I found them and rebooted back to the small drive, my keyboard and mouse stopped working. I can't even sign into Windows now on that drive due to having no keyboard or mouse control. As far as I know, installing drivers to a secondary drive you're not booted from is impossible, and if it isn't, then I have no idea how to do it.
My question is: Is it possible to install drivers to a secondary drive's OS without actually being booted from that drive? If not, then how the hell am I going to salvage this without throwing this computer in the trash/spending hundreds of dollars?