C Drive is 500g with windows on
D Drive is 500g and is for odd stuff
E Drive is 1TB and is my steam disc.
SMART has deteceted that the E Drive is failing. So I bought a 2TB replacement.
I have formatted the failing drive but it still detects an error in smart when booting. I remove the failing E Drive and install the new (E) drive in place of the old one.
Now my system won’t boot at all, I have Windows 7 and I get a please insert a boot disc message when starting my system up. So I go in to the bios and set boot order trying any of the other 3 Hard Drives and still it won’t boot, even though the C drive has my windows install on it and is set as first boot (or 2nd or 3rd) As soon as I plug the failing hard drive in as a 4th drive the system boots up even though nothing is on it.
Any thoughts on what is causing this and how to fix it.
That’s really weird. Usually changing the boot order would do it. It sounds like you may have installed the bootloader to your 1TB disk somehow. You could try cloning that disk to the new 2TB drive using something like acronis, or you can boot offyour windows DVD and choose “repair my install”.
Do you have a brand name PC or a do-it-yourselfer, and are you putting the new hard drive in the same slot as the one that previously had the OS? Some computers have a specific slot for the HD with the operating system, and automatically slave the other slots, so you can’t install the O/S on those drives and boot from them (you can NOT override that through bios boot sequence changes). Alienware PCs are like that, for instance.
At present I put the old hd back in but on a different sata2connectionj and it allowed me to work. I haven’t tried anything with the installation of windows. Might just have to leave it for now or dig out my windows disc and see if I can fix it.
