Windows Won't Boot After Removing Extra Hard Drives

[Milk4Cles]

Windows 7 Pro, 64-bit will not boot up after I removed my 2 extra internal hard drives.

All I did was unplug the sata cables/sata power and put them in to my new computer, leaving only the windows hard drive in. I didn't install windows on the other ones or any of the core files (in fact they were installed probably a year after I built the computer).

Now when I go to boot the computer, the windows logo almost completes coming together but blue screens for about 1/5th of a second then the computer reboots and suggests I go into windows startup repair, which does nothing.

Any ideas?

(ps the computer was off while I removed the hdd's and nothing else has changed).

 

[geofelt]

There is likely a startup program that needs something on the removed hard drives.

Try booting in safe mode F8 and look at the startup programs.

 

[Milk4Cles]

There is likely a startup program that needs something on the removed hard drives.

Try booting in safe mode F8 and look at the startup programs.

Thanks for the reply. I tried booting in Safe Mode and same problem.

I re-attached the two drives and it boots up fine. When I did that, I went into MSConfig and chose selective startup, disabled (unchecked) every item in the "Startup" tab (and unchecked the "Load Startup Items" box), as well as checked "Hide All Microsoft Services" in the other tab and unchecked the remaining items.

Removed the hard drive, still get the 1/4th of a second blue screen.

 

[Hawkeye22]

When you are in disk management, are your "system" and "boot" partitions listed as the same drive or different drives? If they are different drives, you should remove the two extra drives and run a repair install on the OS drive.

 

[geofelt]

If one of the hard drives was present when you did the windows install, windows would have created a small hidden partition on one of them to aid in a possible system recovery.

If you can't figure this out, disconnect both and reinstall windows clean on the single os drive. Might be a good time to buy a ssd for the "C" drive.
After, you should be able to reattach any drive and recover files, but not programs.

 

[Wile E Coyote]

There is likely a startup program that needs something on the removed hard drives.

Try booting in safe mode F8 and look at the startup programs.

Thanks for the reply. I tried booting in Safe Mode and same problem.

I re-attached the two drives and it boots up fine. When I did that, I went into MSConfig and chose selective startup, disabled (unchecked) every item in the "Startup" tab (and unchecked the "Load Startup Items" box), as well as checked "Hide All Microsoft Services" in the other tab and unchecked the remaining items.

Removed the hard drive, still get the 1/4th of a second blue screen.

If one of the hard drives was present when you did the windows install, windows would have created a small hidden partition on one of them to aid in a possible system recovery.

If you can't figure this out, disconnect both and reinstall windows clean on the single os drive. Might be a good time to buy a ssd for the "C" drive.
After, you should be able to reattach any drive and recover files, but not programs.

Areed I have had the same kinda issue with my two drives even though i completely reformatted both.Some times these installed can be quite a headace