Cannot remove Dying 2nd HDD as Win7 fails to load from Primary HDD also

shravank30

shravank30

Disciple
I am having 2 physical HDD
Seagate 250 (D Drive)
WDC 500 (C& E Drives)

I had win XP loaded on my 250 GB HDD
Thereafter i got Win7 loaded on my WDC 500 with Dual boot option.

Everything is working fine except that my 250 HDD has started failing & I am getting message to check for bad errors.

Now when I try to disconnect the 250GB HDD, the Win7 OS also fails to load & I get the error message that insert disk

As soon as I reconnect it, everything works fine.

Moreover Win 7 mycomp is showing 250 GB HDD as 0 bytes so I cannot delete any software from that HDD

I shall be grateful if You can advise me some solution.

Please let me know if you need any more details

Thanks for advising
 
@shravank30 check the flags of the individual volumes of the disk you want to remove.
Make sure that the System, Boot, Page drive, Active, Crash Dump drive is in the same hdd which you want to keep in your system, you can check this using the built in Disk Management. If this flags are not set correct change them. The above mentioned flags should be for the main OS volume.

Another thing is, though I think it might not cause the problem of failure to boot is, if you have installed *ahem* Windows 7 check whether the l o a d e r files like winx.ld, grldr are in the same hard disk that you want to keep.
 
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I have the original Win 7 ultimate 64 bit fully updated

Moreover I am a newbie as far as OS go so the solutions will have to be in easily understandable instructions

The 250 GB is not detected in win7 except as drive but no content

Thanks for advising
 
Lets get this straight, Win Xp is on the 250gb HDD (ie D: ) which is the one you want to remove. This is the original OS you had installed on you system, then you installed Win 7 on the 500 GB HDD (ie C: or E: ) while keeping the XP installation intact.

If that is the case the problem here is that, the boot and system drive is still D: ie 250GB one. It has the boot files in it like ntldr.
First thing you need to do is, with both the drives plugged in open the Disk management. If the drive is not detected rescan the disks using the Actions button.
Right Click on the the drive containing Win 7, I guess C:, and select "Mart partition as active".
Then insert the win7 dvd, switch off the system and remove the 250 ie D:.
Restart the system and select the repair windows installation option.
 
The 250 GB Drive is detected as "D" but the Bytes is 0
I cannot run any diagnostic on it as it says windows cannot detect the disk when i try to run it from mycomp

Please advise
 
Boot win 7 ie C: and then use Disk Management to scan for the drive.
To run Disk mgmt type "disk management" in the 'search program and files' window of the Start menu of Win 7.
 
remove the 250GB hdd

set BIOS to boot from the WDC hdd

use WINDOWS 7 bootable dvd to boot to recovery environment

It will find for windows 7 o/s and give you a the O/s list.

select next.

If it doesnt fix the issue, then ....

select command prompt

and input this

bootrec.exe /fixboot

bootrec /fixmbr

I dont know exactly your issue will be resolved by this method. But i hope it does

For more info you can visit this link

How to Fix Windows 7 When It Fails to Boot
 
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