Strange install issue, could use some advice

[PharmD29]

Hey guys, finally got my Pyro SE 120 up and running after the first was DOA. I am having a really weird issue though that I can't seem to figure out. The way that I installed the operating system on my laptop was I downloaded an ISO windows 7 file because I lost my original CD. Ran the installation from my 60gb OCZ SSD to install windows on the Patriot. Everything was going fine and is currently okay now, except for when I take the OCZ drive out of the UltraBay of my laptop and stick my storage drive back in there, it says operating system not found. Yes, I changed the boot order and that wasn't the issue, the storage drive has an OS on it and it wouldn't boot from that either, kept giving the same error. The second I put the OCZ back in the Ultrabay everything started up fine and I could boot from either one. Did I somehow put the boot manager on the wrong drive or do something wacky?

[canthearu]

Ah, windows 7 got confused and installed the boot partition on your OCZ. Thus when you remove the OCZ, win 7 no longer boots.

You will need to burn the ISO file you have, disconnect the OCZ and then install windows from the CD onto your patriot drive

[PharmD29]

I have never seen that happen before. If I do it your way will it reformat the whole drive and erase all the data I have installed on it in the last few days?

What if I ran the windows 8 consumer preview on the drive, would it install a new partition then?

[canthearu]

You have probably never seen it happen because it only happens occasionally in multi-drive installs. It can probably be avoided by making sure your patriot is plugged into drive 0 and bios set to boot that first .... but I've always just disconnected other drives before installing windows 7. It means there is no risk of damaging data on the wrong drive.

You can direct the install not to wipe your existing data (it will be moved to windows.old), but it is probably better to backup whatever data you don't want to lose and wipe the drive before reinstalling.

Windows 8 would likely have the same setup and same issues.

[PharmD29]

You have probably never seen it happen because it only happens occasionally in multi-drive installs. It can probably be avoided by making sure your patriot is plugged into drive 0 and bios set to boot that first .... but I've always just disconnected other drives before installing windows 7. It means there is no risk of damaging data on the wrong drive.

You can direct the install not to wipe your existing data (it will be moved to windows.old), but it is probably better to backup whatever data you don't want to lose and wipe the drive before reinstalling.

Windows 8 would likely have the same setup and same issues.

Yeah the main problem is I have a laptop with only two bays so I am kind of limited. I will have to burn a CD but I really hope it creates a boot partition when I do it without deleting the files.

[canthearu]

Don't hope and take the chance, back up anything you want to keep before reinstalling.