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My old pentium core duo had 2 drives in it, I just took one drive out and installed windows 7 (32-bit ultimate). Installation seemed to go fine, but when it rebooted I got a black screen error saying:

'windows failed to start. a recent hardware or software change ..."

could it be because the hard drive is not set to boot?

My boot priority is set to CD, then HD in the bios.

Could it be a master/slave issue somehow?

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master/slave issue only if you're still using IDE drives, is the other hard drive still listed in the BIOS (User defined rather than Auto)? – Molly7244 Jan 4 '10 at 0:45
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You should go into the bios and check the SATA settings, most bios settings will default it to AHCI Mode try changing it to Compatibility mode save then restart the system.

Alternatively if that fails, load to the windows 7 install disc and run the startup repair option, it may repair an issue the the bcd file your computer needs to boot.

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