Windows not booting up after hardware change.

December 5, 2010 8:57 PM

I have a problem with Windows 7 startup after I made some hardware changes. The computer won't boot automatically and I'm hoping for some suggestions.

I recently moved a computer into a new case and removed a hard disk (the hard disk contained only music and movies, nothing related to Windows or any installed programs which were both installed on their own partitions.

When the computer starts to boot, the first thing I see is the splash screen from my motherboard, a spaceship graphic with "Hit del to go to BIOS, tab to post" writing. That's normal.

After that, it goes blank for a minute or two.

Then the initialising, memory check and other standard startup diagnostics comes.

Then it goes blank again.

Then we're back to the motherboard spaceship graphic.

Then once again blackness.

And then a new screen saying there was a problem, choose the OS to boot.
1) Windows Setup
2) Windows Vista.

I choose Vista, it then boots up normally though perhaps a little slowly into Windows 7. (This computer was originally Vista, but was upgraded to Windows 7 a while ago).

Once booted everything appears fine, though I do have to set the screen resolution correctly to my monitor's native resolution, it reverts to the previous settings every time it starts up.

Before I swapped the cases over and removed the videos hard disk it worked fine. I'm fairly sure I put everything back in correctly and hooked it up properly. After all, once I do get it to boot the computer works fine.

I've gone into BIOS and looked at the boot order. It's fine.
1) Hard disk
2) DVD drive
3) Deactivated.

The system partition C: is on the ATA disk. There is also an IDE disk which contains nothing much at the moment.

Windows has no error messages.

When I ran the Windows Setup/Repair utility from the Windows DVD it was unable to find the existing Windows installation.

Can anyone suggest what I should try next?

posted by Mokusatsu to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Try EasyBCD

It's a GUI for the Windows Boot Configuration Data Editor.

More info
posted by Duke999R at 9:14 PM on December 5, 2010

I tried that. While it let me edit the boot menu it didn't actually improve things.

I still have the 5 minute long sequence of blank screens, long memory checks, motherboard splash screens and finally a boot menu, and when I get into WIndows I still have to keep fixing the screen resolution...

Perhaps I'm not doing it right, can you suggest something which I can do with EasyBSD which will cut out the 5 minutes of running around in circles and just make it boot Windows immediately, like normal?
posted by Mokusatsu at 12:03 AM on December 6, 2010

It's been a while, but my situation was that for some reason Win7 had used my non-system drive (D:\) for the bootloader. Every so often, not every time, I would get a boot sequence similar to the one you describe.

I used these steps to recreate the bootloader on the C:\ drive. Fixed my problem.

I'm self taught with this stuff, so YMMV. Hope it helps though.
posted by Duke999R at 12:30 AM on December 6, 2010

This sounds a lot like a recent problem I had: http://ask.metafilter.com/160325/Metafilter-am-I-thwarted

I would try recreating the bootloader as Duke suggests.
posted by BZArcher at 5:56 AM on December 6, 2010

What Duke said. I've found this (annoying!) issue as well. Basically, if you have more than one drive installed while installing Windows 7, W7 will freak out if the other drive is removed. (My hacky solution: Just unplug the second drive while installing the OS.)
posted by neckro23 at 10:03 AM on December 6, 2010 [1 favorite]