Hardware Hard Disk Reliance Issue

[potato3334]

My computer one day suddenly stopped sending any signals to my display, so I just decided to take the chance to upgrade to my friend's old computer. Of course, I needed to reinstall windows cuz my friend's computer used a different motherboard, but I wanted to keep my files.

I borrowed my friend's old hard drive and connected my own hard drive to my friend's computer in order to transfer the files i wanted. After I transferred the files and installed windows on my hard drive, I disconnected my friend's hard drive as it was no longer needed.

But after restarting the computer, it wouldn't boot from my hard drive. It would only allow me to boot from it if both mine and my friend's hard drive were connected to it at the same time. The Bios Settings still recognizes the hard drive, but for some reason it has somehow become reliant on my friend's hard drive to boot.

I want to make the computer boot from my hard drive without relying on any other hard drive. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[FAST6191]

I am having trouble following what you did

You had a computer and it died (or at least the graphics card did) and decided you might as well swap it out at this point.

You got a replacement computer and yanked the hard drive that was in your now dead computer and stuck it in the new one.

Presumably as your hard drive from the dead computer was bigger or something you decided you wanted to use that in the new machine but windows being windows you needed to reinstall it thanks to moving computer.

You then copied all your files to the hard drive that came with the new computer and pulled it out.

With your files safely backed up you formatted the hard drive from your dead computer and installed windows and drivers and whatever else needed for the new machine to your original hard drive. Or did you not get that far?

Either way though the computer will not boot from your new hard drive unless the old one is in it. I assume you have not go any linux installs or such like going on here, have removed the DVDs you installed from and have no special USB loader going on with an internal USB drive or something like that.

Three options as I see it

1) The BIOS is looking for your friend's hard drive. Rare (BIOS is usually pretty dumb and will boot of anything that it thinks is a hard drive if it has the boot flag) but I have seen it before.

2) Your original hard drive lost its boot options somewhere along the line. Not sure how that might happen with a standard windows install but if you played with EasyBCD and stuff like it then that becomes somewhat more possible/likely. Secondary to this is the actual boot manager.

3) Your install is straddled across a couple of hard drives- it expects documents to be on several partitions or something and is throwing a hissy fit because it does not see it. It will usually boot though or at least get to the point where it said got an error in here.


Fixing happens in that order as well
Go to the BIOS and remove/reorder the boot options so it can not fail to see the hard drive.

If that does not work or you think you have it done properly then get a copy of (gparted/ http://partedmagic.com/doku.php ) and set the boot flag- http://gparted.sourceforge.net/display-doc.php?name=help-manual#gparted-manage-partition-flags . Such programs come as part of hiren's boot CD (no links but a search should find it) and ubcd ( http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ ) both of which I suggest you have in a computer fixing kit (if you are big enough and ugly enough to be swapping out hard drives from dead machines and being bored at doing yet another OS install you are at that point).
On the boot manager stuff both hiren's and UBCD should contain programs to boot things which might get you into windows and should be able to redo the windows boot manager (though maybe not windows 8*)

The straddled stuff I would be shocked to see and would expect some actual "can't find" type errors rather than BIOS level stuff.

*windows 8 did introduce a new boot method (UEFI secure boot) though this should not be the problem here.

 

[potato3334]

U got the gist of the situation, but basically yeah, it wont boot up without my friends hard drive connected. I have already tried making the computer boot from my hard drive as the only viable option, but tbat didnt work. Let me specofy the error that occurs when the computer tries to boot from my hard drive:

Reboot and Select proper Boot device
Or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key.

Either way, i will try out your suggetions and report my findings, thanks for helping

 

[potato3334]

Ok I just booted from the windows 7 install disk and reinstalled windows 7 completely, deleted the partition and eveyrthing, and made sure the other hard drive wasnt connected, and that fixed the problem. I guess it really was a problem with the windows files being seperated over both of them. thanks for the help