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Question

New hard drive issues

by Apr 8, 2015 10:41AM PDT

So i acquired a couple of new hard drives and wanted to add them to my system. I boot up my pc without either of them attached then hook them up once fully booted. They show up in computer management as drive D and E. D has an operating system on it but i didnt know how much of a problem this would pose when formatting it. After formatting D and rebooting, my computer had no operating system and for whatever reason in my BIOS my original hard drive ( a toshiba) now reads as a Hitachi (two new hard drives) Im aware i probably screwed this up beyond repair but could someone at least tell me what i did wrong? Should i not have tried to format a disk that had an already present OS EVEN IF it wasnt the one i was currently running off of?

Discussion is locked

9 Posts
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Clarification Request
You said they were new
by Steven Haninger Apr 8, 2015 7:35PM PDT

You also said you hooked them up after booting the system and that one had an OS. A new drive will not have an OS and you cannot hook up a new hard drive in the way you mentioned. By any chance are these USB drives and are they used? There's something missing in the sequence of events in your post. If your Toshiba had Windows installed on it, the OS wouldn't format the drive it resides on.

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New to me
by tek13 Apr 8, 2015 11:30PM PDT

They were not new hard drives but they were new to me. My original hard drive had windows 7 installed, and I hooked up the other two "new" ones after fully booted via SATA. One of them had windows vista installed. Under computer management I right clicked and selected format for drive D, (the "new" hard drive with vista installed), and when I rebooted my computer, the above mentioned problems ensued.

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Without seeing this myself, all I can suggest...
by Steven Haninger Apr 9, 2015 2:40AM PDT

and I suspect you've done this, is to remove the "new" drives and see if your Toshiba takes over. This could be a boot order issue. If you've done this already, I cannot figure what could cause this. You could try to do a repair from the Windows console if you have a bootable Windows DVD.

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If I understand you correctly ...
by Kees_B Forum moderator Apr 9, 2015 3:40AM PDT

you connected the 'new' disks via SATA while the system was running. That might be the cause of the confusion. Better do it only when powered down.

Kees

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Correct
by tek13 Apr 9, 2015 5:06AM PDT

For whatever reason doing that it then boots off one of the "new" drives instead of my original one, and I couldn't get it to change in the bios, which is why I decided to hook them up after booting up. I figured that would be an issue but I wasn't really sure what to do. As far as only running off the original, at this point it's ll messed up saying its a different drive and has no OS. I get the "bootmgr is missing" message.

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You might be able to fix that with a Windows DVD
by Steven Haninger Apr 9, 2015 10:01AM PDT

You'd boot the installation disk and select "repair" rather than install. You'd select "Startup Repair" from the menu of options. There's also the possibility that a small 100mb partition got deactivated. I've heard that this can be fixed by some third party utilities but have not experienced this problem. You'd need to run some partition manager utility and it should show the Windows partition and the 100 mb partition. Windows Explorer doesn't see this one.

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Re: bootmgr missing
by Kees_B Forum moderator Apr 9, 2015 5:36PM PDT

Power off, disconnect all drives, then connect only the original one to the original connector on the motherboard and reinstall Windows if necessary. Viewing that original disk a partition manager, as Steven suggests, (GPARTED runs from USB-stick or CD, and there are others also like AOMEI) might be a good idea.

And why not use that partition manager to erase the "new" drives also and make them unbootable? To prevent errors, do it while the "old" disk is disconnected. You don't want to erase the old disk after you just reinstalled Windows to it, do you?

Kees

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Clarification Request
I guessing this is a laptop
by itsdigger Apr 10, 2015 1:16AM PDT

My Toshiba has room for 2 internal HDD's but only 1 is used for the OS , and it is OEM. The other for storage.

Are the 2 used HDD's from other laptops with OEM operating systems?
You can only use your original OEM with the laptop not another OEM OS.

Digger

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Answer
considering the BIOS oddity
by Apr 9, 2015 2:57AM PDT

I'd reset it using the CMOS short jumper on the motherboard. Check your manual, usually near the coin battery (CR2032)

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