Weirdest Tech problem ever!

Excuse the length of this but its a doosey! There is a summarise at the end if you want to skip the detail

Decided to install a trial of Windows 7 Ultimate x64 over the weekend

Installed over my XP sweet as a nut and was going waaaay too smoothly...my PC was definitely luring me into a false sense of security..

After using Win 7 for a few minutes I noticed my HD started to make a nasty clicking noise so obviously the HD was about to fail. I had everything backed up to another 500gb drive so wasnt a big deal but thought I may as well get a new HD. So went into town and got a 1Tb drive and began the process of cloning.

Eventually after going through Acronis,DriveXML and DrData software I settled on Norton Ghost which seemed like it was doing the job. Rebooted after cloning and lo and behold it even switched the new HD to the C drive and booted off it. I confirmed in diskmgmt.msc that the new HD was listed as the boot device.

I shut down and unplugged old HD and hit the power button...flicked past BIOS and then nothing...just a flickering cursor at the top left of screen. I shut down, plugged in old HD and it booted back into Win 7 perfectly..now I know what you are thinking it is still booting off the old HD so I went into diskmgmt.msc and was able to unmount the old HD without the system crashing. I even physically uplugged it and Win 7 was still running off the new HD.

What is even weirder is that it will only boot into Win 7 off the new HD when old HD is plugged into Sata channel 0 and new HD in Sata channel 2!

I decided I would just do a clean install of Win 7 over the new HD so shut down uplugged old HD, put Win 7 into DVD drive and set BIOS to boot from DVD...nothing...the exact same DVD which allowed me to install Win 7 in the 1st place wouldnt boot! And I tried this many many times and it just wont boot from the DVD!

So plugged old HD back in with the new HD and booted into Win 7 and decided to run Win 7 install from within Win7 and it ran fine and I installed it to the new HD and rebooted. Same problem occured though this time when I try to boot off the old HD on its own now it gives me some 0x0000000 error and asks me to run a repair from the Win 7 install DVD..(thats the one that wont allow me to boot up off it!)

I've messed around with Easy BCD to no effect and since win7 doesnt have a boot.ini I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place here!

So to summarise:
Will only let me boot into Win 7 on new HD when old HD is plugged into Sata channel 0
Wont boot from old HD at all,asks me to run repair from DVD
Wont boot from Win7 DVD

I have spent about 20 hrs in total over the weekend trying various fixes but if anyone can suggest anything that will sort this out my eternal gratitude will be yours

Fysh

It sounds like part of your problem is your bootloader being on the old disk - which you could repair by booting off the DVD and using the "repair my computer" options (either the automatic repair or manually via the recovery console). However, not booting from the DVD sounds like it may be a BIOS issue.

Check your BIOS config and make sure the optical drive is enabled, and try booting the machine with neither HDD attached and just the DVD drive. That should at least let you know whether the board and optical drive are behaving correctly; at that point you can look at the harddrives.

Will try the booting with no HD's and let you know. cheers

Capt'n Midnight

Deleted User wrote: »

.just a flickering cursor at the top left of screen.

check that the boot partition on the drive is set active

Capt'n Midnight

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

check that the boot partition on the drive is set active

Is this viewable in diskmgmt.msc? as I do seem to recall 'active' and 'bootable' being listed on the drive. Otherwise where would I view that?

Well the unplug all HDs didnt work as its still not booting off the DVD even though it is set to in bios.

And today its not booting up at all irrespective of which HD is plugged in where! When new HD is in Sata 0 I get the error msg asking me to run repair and when old HD is plugged into Sata 0 I get flashing cursor on top left of screen!

Ok,its letting me install XP from the disk that came with PC
Long way round to fix it but will get there in the end.
Thanks for the suggestions anyway guys