Help needed with boot drive, problems

[g335]

Hello

I am having trouble with my boot drive.

I am using a old dell system which I added a 2nd hdd and upgraded to Windows 8 than 8.1 about 1 and a have ago.

I still have the orginal drive in the pc that came with it(It has Vista on it). I have the newer drive set as the boot drive/main drive and the other one just a 2nd drive. I haven't formatted the original drive(2nd drive) for Windows 8. I have some info on it so I left it alone and never use it.

When I disconnected the old 2nd drive from the system, Windows says it cannot detect any hard drive.

I tried leaving the 2nd drive connected and unplugged the main drive and Windows says the same thing.

What could be wrong with my system? Does it mean I have to keep the old 2nd drive with Vista connected even though I never use it?

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Did you remember to remove the old hard drive from the system before installing Windows 8 on the new hard drive?
If you didn't, then remove it now and re-install Windows 8 again on the new hard drive.
But delete the existing Windows 8 partition first, then create a new partition, format it & install Windows 8.

Lesson: never leave an existing Windows installation connected to the system unless you want to install a newer version in dual-boot configuration which allows you to choose which version you want to run every time you reboot.