- Mar 23, 2016
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- 10,510
Please bear with me for my short tale of difficulty and discovery:
1. I recently cloned my Windows 7 OS from an HDD to an SSD and disconnected the old HDD (though I left it in the computer case-just in case). I reordered my HDDs and startup devices in the BIOS and everything
was working smoothly.
2. Background Note #1: a couple of years ago I had a dual boot setup, but I decided to keep Win 7 and ditch Vista so I disabled the dual boot option and deleted the Vista installation. I even repartitioned the
old hard drive so the space occupied by the old Vista partition was added to the Win 7 partition. The computer reliably booed straight into Win 7 without asking me to select an OS.
3. I noticed that my newly cloned SSD-based installation of Win 7 was running under "selective startup" rather than "normal startup" (judging from msconfig information). I thought I would just set it to "normal
startup" but that turned out to be a bad decision. After I restarting I was presented a dual boot option: Vista or Win 7! I thought I had seen the last of that. I selected Win 7 and then got the message,
"Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause." It suggested I do a repair with the Win 7 setup disk. I do have my Win 7 setup disk but couldn't get the computer to boot from
the CD drive.
4. Background Note #2: The reason the computer wouldn't boot from the CD-ROM drive was because I thought that all I had to do was set the CD-ROM as the first boot device in the BIOS and then it would
AUTOMATICALLY boot from the CD-ROM. Ha!I now know that I was only part of the way there: I ALSO had to press F8 at the right point in the boot process, select the CD-ROM drive using the arrow keys, and THEN
respond to a "press-any-key-to-boot-from-the-CD-ROM" message. Now I know.
5. Not being able to boot to the setup CD, I re-connected my orininal HDD, disconnected the SSD, reordered boot devices in BIOS, and successfully booted to the old installation of Win 7.
6. I re-cloned the HDD to the SSD (repeating step 1) and now I am back where I started.
7. Should I worry that the computer is running in selective startup mode? Now that I know how, should I boot to the setup CD and do a repair (a possible boot-sector issue)? Or should I just leave well enough
alone?
1. I recently cloned my Windows 7 OS from an HDD to an SSD and disconnected the old HDD (though I left it in the computer case-just in case). I reordered my HDDs and startup devices in the BIOS and everything
was working smoothly.
2. Background Note #1: a couple of years ago I had a dual boot setup, but I decided to keep Win 7 and ditch Vista so I disabled the dual boot option and deleted the Vista installation. I even repartitioned the
old hard drive so the space occupied by the old Vista partition was added to the Win 7 partition. The computer reliably booed straight into Win 7 without asking me to select an OS.
3. I noticed that my newly cloned SSD-based installation of Win 7 was running under "selective startup" rather than "normal startup" (judging from msconfig information). I thought I would just set it to "normal
startup" but that turned out to be a bad decision. After I restarting I was presented a dual boot option: Vista or Win 7! I thought I had seen the last of that. I selected Win 7 and then got the message,
"Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause." It suggested I do a repair with the Win 7 setup disk. I do have my Win 7 setup disk but couldn't get the computer to boot from
the CD drive.
4. Background Note #2: The reason the computer wouldn't boot from the CD-ROM drive was because I thought that all I had to do was set the CD-ROM as the first boot device in the BIOS and then it would
AUTOMATICALLY boot from the CD-ROM. Ha!I now know that I was only part of the way there: I ALSO had to press F8 at the right point in the boot process, select the CD-ROM drive using the arrow keys, and THEN
respond to a "press-any-key-to-boot-from-the-CD-ROM" message. Now I know.
5. Not being able to boot to the setup CD, I re-connected my orininal HDD, disconnected the SSD, reordered boot devices in BIOS, and successfully booted to the old installation of Win 7.
6. I re-cloned the HDD to the SSD (repeating step 1) and now I am back where I started.
7. Should I worry that the computer is running in selective startup mode? Now that I know how, should I boot to the setup CD and do a repair (a possible boot-sector issue)? Or should I just leave well enough
alone?
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