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I just tried to upgrade my wife's computer to an SSD for silence and speed.

To do the install I physically added the new SSD to an empty SATA port and then used the Windows 7 install disk to put a fresh copy on the SSD. During this process I left the original hard drive attached to the system. My wife then just copied the files she wanted from the old drive to the new SSD.

Yesterday, I removed the old drive and the SSD will not boot. It appears that the SSD is missing the boot sector altogether. It is also missing the recovery partition normally seen on Win 7 boot drives. It appears that the Win7 installer just used the boot loader on the original drive. I should have disconnected the original drive while I installed Win7 on the new SSD. Here is my question.

Is there a way for me to fix the SSD to be a stand alone boot drive?

I would rather not start over from the beginning because my wife has the new SSD all set up the way she likes it.

Thanks for any advice.

Pete

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  • When the pc is booting can you go into the 'boot options' menu and select the SSD? It is possible that the BIOS does not have the new drive configured as a boot option.
    – Mike Naylor
    Feb 11, 2014 at 16:28
  • Yes, when booting I can go into the BIOS boot menu and the SSD is listed. On the other hand, when I go into setup the SSD does not show up in the boot order list or otherwise. This is true whether I plug the SSD into an internal SATA port or the eSATA port. The machine is an old Gateway SFF machine. OS is Windows 7 64 bit.
    – Pedro_Uno
    Feb 12, 2014 at 0:42
  • I should mention that I tried using "bootrec /fixboot" and "bootrec /fixmbr" from the recovery disk command prompt. Also, I looked at the SSD with a partition editor and it is missing the 100MB recovery partition that is usually the first partition on a Windows 7 boot drive.
    – Pedro_Uno
    Feb 12, 2014 at 12:51
  • When you select the SSD from the boot menu do you receive an error when the system tries to boot to it?
    – Mike Naylor
    Feb 12, 2014 at 13:58
  • 1
    My windows 7 64 bit install does not have any other partitions than the C: drive. So missing a "Recovery" partition should not be a problem. This definitely sounds like a boot sector issue. Did you try the fixboot and fixmbr with the other drive removed and the SSD on the first SATA port?
    – Damon
    Feb 13, 2014 at 9:59

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Yes you can.

Find out from diskpart,list disk,select disk 0,list partition,select partition #N,detail partition about what drive letter your windows drive has (say C:).

Then, bcdboot C:\Windows /s C: /f BIOS to regenerate all boot files.

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2
  • @peterdudley good to know. But why not convert to UEFI?
    – Milind R
    Feb 15, 2014 at 13:29
  • Be sure to run the command prompt as administrator or you may get: "Failure when attempting to copy boot files."
    – Adam Jimenez
    Sep 14, 2014 at 10:49
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Attach hard disk again and boot from it.

Open Disk Management - on SSD mark Windows partition as active using right-click ->

See which drive letter corresponds to SDD Windows partition. Assume it is D:.

Open administrative command prompt:

  1. bootsect /nt60 ALL /force /mbr

  2. bcdboot d:\windows /s d: (if another drive letter corresponds to SSD Windows partition replace it)

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  • This also worked for me
    – trianta2
    Feb 18, 2015 at 19:45

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