hard drive formatting issue [windows 7]

[miokomioko]

So... I had an old machine running Windows 7 a long time ago. When I built a new system, which is my current, I installed Windows 7 on a fresh new hard drive (C) and decided to also drop my old machine's main drive (D) into it as well so I could easily access any shit off of it that I might end up wanting in the future (I have lots of archived photo stuff I couldn't be bothered to sift through at the time).

Every time I boot up this computer, it would recognize that there were two bootable drives in it, both with Windows 7 installed and I have to choose one (but it would count-down and auto-boot into my default C drive anyways). A minor inconvenience I never cared about as I rarely shut the thing down.

One tidbit I did notice over the last few years is that every time I would go to empty my recycle bin, I could hear an otherwise unused hard drive begin to spin up just to perform that task. I'm assuming this would be the D drive, but I have no clue why it would use that drive just to delete files when everything I'm running is allegedly on C, including the very files being deleted.

Fast-forward to now: I finally just reorganized all my archived crap and want to wipe that old D drive clean and begin to use it as a backup drive to clone my archives into periodically. However, Windows 7 will not allow me to delete any of the system-related files from the old D drive, thus I cannot fuck the partitions, let alone format the whole thing. I managed to find that the partition on D was marked active and removed that... but it didn't solve the problem.


Disk Manager says:
C - 1397.26 GB - NTFS - Healthy (boot, page file, active, crash dump, primary partition)
D - 465.75 GB - NTFS - Healthy (system, primary partition) - 8 MB unallocated

Attempting to format D results in:
"Format is not allowed on the current boot, system, page file, crashdump, or hibernation volume."


I imagine that I need to somehow un-mark D's partition as being a "system" volume as well as a "primary partition" but with the aforementioned tidbit, I'm concerned that my Windows 7 running on C has always been pulling system files from D and simply wiping it might be catastrophic.

Even just a point in the right direction would be really helpful. All I want to do is completely reformat D, but I'm concerned that it might affect my current OS if I'm not careful. What I just lost my steam on with Googlin' shit was people saying to find and relocate the bootmgr...


edit: Problem solved: I removed the D drive entirely and used a Windows 7 installation disc to run StartUp Recovery which replaced C's missing bootmgr files. I probably will entirely replace the old D drive since it's a crappy 'ol 500 GB IDE.

[hey]

Just boot a windows install disk or something and format from there.

[miokomioko]

Just boot a windows install disk or something and format from there.

Bah. That's what I was hoping not to hear. I just reorganized all the junk in my apartment and did not come across any of my Windows discs and am assuming they are at my dad's place an hour away...

[hey]

Just download one.

[arshesney]

Downlaod a bootable gparted, no need for it to be windows

[Niya]

If you really think your primary system may have some used files on the other HDD, just unplug it and boot. If everything works as normal, you're safe to delete/format it.
If you can't find any windows disks, why not just use a live linux system like gparted for it? Download the ISO, burn it, boot it and delete all partitions. If you're not that good around linux, better unplug your primary HDD before doing so, just so you don't format the wrong disk.

[Isiolia]

When you set up the machine, were both hard drives connected? Windows 7 has that ~200MB system boot partition it creates on a fresh drive, but if it sees one on an existing drive when you install it'll just use that instead.

If you want to see what'll happen, just unplug the drive. If it still boots up happily, then find some other method to blow up the existing partition scheme and reformat (bootable Linux DVD maybe). If it stops and can't find the OS, well...next time unplug everything but the system drive when you install Windows.

[miokomioko]

So... I unplugged the old D drive and attempted to boot up just C in there and it failed with:
BOOTMGR is missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

I plugged it back in and now it won't boot at all because it still gives me that same bootmgr error.

When I try to boot from the D drive instead, I get the error:
Boot from CD/DVD :
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

Da fuk? It thinks my D drive is a CD/DVD drive now? The bios still detects the two drives just fine, but I noticed they are both set to master...

I got my hands on a Windows 7 disc, going to see if I can repair C's missing bootmgr or something...
I think you're right Isiolia, I noticed that the D drive had a separate little partition, but it was only a secluded 8MB from the 500 MB, the C drive only has one giant partition for the whole 1.5 TB.

Should I take the D drive out during the potential OS repair to avoid any confusion... or would the lack of that small Windows partition on C make it want to reformat?

Any knee-jerk ideas in the meantime? Would appreciate! :3

edit: Fuck. System recovery doesn't even detect either of the Windows 7s to even attempt a repair...

edit2: This is getting slightly weird... Several black-screen freeze-ups left and right at random places in the boot process, I'm getting lucky to get it through to boot from the CD to the point where I pick a language. I took the D drive out of the equation entirely and I managed to get the System Recovery to detect the OS on drive C and begin the StartUp Recovery now that D wasn't confusing it. It "completed" and before I had the opportunity to click Finish, it crashed. Still attempting to get through the StartUp Recovery because it still won't boot off C.

edit3: Holy shit... just rebooted for the umpteenth time and THIS TIME, it booted into my normal Windows 7... Am confused... but it might be fixed. Everything is running fine on the C solo, but I'm concerned about what kind of confusion it might cause when I bring the D drive back into play. I might end up getting an IDE > USB adapter and wiping it clean via MacOS.

[hey]

You just need to move the bootmgr to the c drive, and delete the entry for the other drive. Should be easy to find more info with google.

[Niya]

Oh the dreaded boot partitions on the wrong disk... Had similar "fun" with my old rig when i installed Win7 to a new HDD and it added itself to the XP bootloader (or at least used the old disk for it). Couldn't delete the XP partition because of it, so I just unmounted it and it just was there, unused, for years xD

Glad you got it working again. And as said before, if you want to get rid of the "wrong" boot config on the old drive, unplug the working system drive, only attach the old one, and boot from your windows or a linux cd/dvd to wipe it.

Btw, did you really say IDE? oO How old are those HDDs? If they are, dump them. You should usually replace your HDDs after 3-5 years, risk of data loss gets bigger and bigger with every year.

[miokomioko]

Just the old 500 GB drive is IDE... it really was only in there for me to pull old files from when I got around to it (never) but it turned into a backup drive that I couldn't entirely clear out. I was actually just floating around Newegg, considering getting that drive out of my life and replacing it with just another 1.5 TB SATA for like, what, fifty bucks? I'm just glad I decided to organize all my files and copied everything of importance to my main drive before this debacle. At least it makes sense to just replace the old one and avoid potential boot problems entirely. I'm way overdue for an entire rebuild anyhow. Fuck this AMD CPU.

[bungiefan]

To avoid this in the future when doing a new install, only have the one hard drive you will use for the OS plugged in. That way you won't have it do anything to any other drive during install. I also do this when I'm doing a Linux install on its own drive. Rather than pick a drive at boot and delay it when I occasionally want to switch, I can just change the motherboard settings to the new default. It keeps a Windows reinstall from borking the bootloader too.