I have now built 3 machines using Win7 and I noticed an interesting problem:
When installing on a machine that has more than one blank hard drive Win 7 seems to write some critical boot files to the second hard drive. I noticed that later if there are any issues with the second hard drive or it gets removed or reformatted all of a sudden there are boot problems even though Win 7 was only installed to the first (main, (C) hard drive). The error I get when booting is "Boot manager missing" "Press ctrl+alt+del to reboot". When this happens I have to run a repair install or worse re-install.
It seems weird that Windows would write anything to a drive other than the one being used as the C: drive that is where the install lives.
Also, I learned the hard way that if I am installing Win 7 on a system with 2 identical hard drives, especially 2 SSD's this is a bad idea because not only does the second drive get some critical files written to it but if I want to remove one of the drives later to be used in another machine, I have no idea which one the Windows install is physically located on since there are no indicator (activity) lights on the drives.
Anyway, maybe there is an obvious reason for the system files that I am not aware of since I am not a super geek when it come s to these things. For now I just start a system install with only one drive in the box. Then later I add the second and third hard drives.
I am just interested in knowing why Windows does this and if there is a solution so I can avoid a post install of the backup or secondary drives....
Thanks,
Dave
When installing on a machine that has more than one blank hard drive Win 7 seems to write some critical boot files to the second hard drive. I noticed that later if there are any issues with the second hard drive or it gets removed or reformatted all of a sudden there are boot problems even though Win 7 was only installed to the first (main, (C) hard drive). The error I get when booting is "Boot manager missing" "Press ctrl+alt+del to reboot". When this happens I have to run a repair install or worse re-install.
It seems weird that Windows would write anything to a drive other than the one being used as the C: drive that is where the install lives.
Also, I learned the hard way that if I am installing Win 7 on a system with 2 identical hard drives, especially 2 SSD's this is a bad idea because not only does the second drive get some critical files written to it but if I want to remove one of the drives later to be used in another machine, I have no idea which one the Windows install is physically located on since there are no indicator (activity) lights on the drives.
Anyway, maybe there is an obvious reason for the system files that I am not aware of since I am not a super geek when it come s to these things. For now I just start a system install with only one drive in the box. Then later I add the second and third hard drives.
I am just interested in knowing why Windows does this and if there is a solution so I can avoid a post install of the backup or secondary drives....
Thanks,
Dave
