Dying HDD and Windows Boot issue

[Greatguardian]

Hi, BG Tech. Long time no see. I'm running into a snag with one of my hard drives, and I'm a bit stumped as to what's going on here.

Background: I'm running a fairly new self-built PC, LGA1366 base, with a few older parts that I've recycled.

Installed Drives:
1 Ancient 200GB Western Digital HDD, 5400 RPM, Windows 7 x64 Professional, Dying
1 1.5TB Seagate HDD, 5400 RPM, Storage drive only
1 90GB Kingston SSD, Windows 7 x64 Ultimate - This is the OS I currently use.

When I bought my SSD about a year back, I decided that it wasn't worth the trouble trying to back up and wipe the fairly tiny/old 200GB drive, so I left its OS alone and just installed a fresh copy of Windows on the SSD. On startup, I'm always asked to choose which OS to boot from, and just roll with the SSD OS.

Now, I knew that my ancient HDD would die eventually, but I figured that it shouldn't really cause any troubles aside from minor data loss (most things I wanted to keep were moved to my storage drive anyways). Unfortunately, now that that time has come, this does not seem to be the case.

Right now, whenever I boot up the machine, the dying HDD has serious trouble spinning up (it clicks, and I believe that some mechanisms are just getting stuck and the drive refuses to complete spinup - this doesn't bother me on its own, hard drives die, I don't intend to save it, etc etc etc). My machine will POST, but for some reason it refuses to treat my SSD as a bootable drive and instead tries to boot from CD/DVD.

Now, before you say it, and I know someone will anyways, yes I have gone into my BIOS and changed the default boot device to my SSD. To be extra redundant, I went so far as to set both the First and Second boot devices as HDD, and only the Third boot device as CD/DVD. I have even gone into the Boot Manager menu (available after POST but before OS startup) and selected my Kingston SSD to boot from.

Side Note: I've also switched my SATA inputs so that my Kingston SSD is now Channel 1 Master and my Dying HDD is Channel 2 Master (or Port 3). This had no effect.

It just won't boot. I don't know why. I have a perfectly good Windows installation on my SSD. It just refuses to boot from it whenever the old drive doesn't spin up. Thus far, I've managed to eventually get the computer up and running by opening the case and shaking the dying HDD a little when it's trying to spin up, presumably knocking the moving parts back into alignment and unsticking whatever was stuck. While this has worked for the past 2 boots, I am sure that it is only further damaging the drive as a whole and do not expect it to be a solution for long.

Any thoughts on what might be going on here?

Final Thoughts: I did redirect my My Documents folder and a couple other folders on the SSD's OS to my Dying Drive, in order to both save space and save time merging folders from the previous OS. I feel like this shouldn't stop Windows from booting altogether, but I'd welcome any ideas at this point.

Thanks in advance, guys and gals.

[Sonomaa]

you need to rebuild the bootloader which is on your old HD, not your new one (the thing that tells your computer where the operating system actually is)
you can google for this stuff, Ill look around in my notes as Ive had this issue before and was able to fix it by rebuilding my bootloader. it was annoying as shit but its doable and once its done you are in the clear

[hey]

For future reference, you may wish to disconnect the old hdd while installing windows, to make sure everything is installed to the correct drive.

[Greatguardian]

Thanks guys! I'll give that a shot.

Update: Worked like a charm! Thanks again, guys.