New HDD won't boot without old one

[finchy400]

Hi All

I hope you can help.

I recently purchased a new samsung 1tb hdd for my pc with the intention of using the old hdd for backing up files etc. i also purchased a new copy of windows 7 and installed it on the new drive, however ever since then I always get the same message telling me that an another or an earlier version of windows is also installed, which is a copy of xp on the old drive...... I didn't think anything of that.

However having since I removed the old drive to use in a caddy, windows will now not boot and I receive a message asking for the boot disk to be installed. Only if i connect the old drive will it boot.

When I look at the disk management in windows 7, it shows the new hdd as the Healthy (boot, page file, crash dump, primary partition) and the old drive as Healthy (System).

I'm sure it's glaringly obvious to a lot of you where I’ve gone wrong but for the time being I’m stumped!!

cheers

 

[price_th]

The fact that the win 7 was seeing the old os tells me it was going there to install. Reinstall 7 with just the new drive connected. When finished re-add the old drive if need be. Just make sure the boot order in the bios is set to the new drive as first.

 

[WyomingKnott]

price_th has the solution. To explain a bit more, all of the Windows installation procedures look for an existing bootable disk. If they find one, they add their installation to that disk's boot menu instead of making bootable the drive to which you are installing.

 

[finchy400]

Thanks very much for your help, will give that a go later!