Deleting a Win7 system

[Andrew Mawson]

Having eventually (*) managed to recover my system back up onto a replacement hard drive when the original one failed, I've ended up with a basic Win7 operating system on another SATA drive that I want to use as a second drive in an existing Win7 system.

If I just bung it in, is Win7 going to object to having two bootable drives (C: and this new one that will be F:) before I can use the system to format the drive?

(*) I've been religiously backing up my system every week across the network to a 1Tb external USB drive on another pc. When I needed to actually use the system image to recover the failed system it turns out the Win7 'system restore' cannot recover from an external USB drive - it can see the file directory ('WindowsImageBackup'), tells me what date the latest back up set is, but then claims that it contains no back up files despite being 190 Gb large! - copying that directory to a second internal SATA drive, 'system restore' was quite happy to use it an get me back up and running - very odd.

!!!!!!!!! Please don't let this thread degenerate into a Windows / Unix / I hate Bill Gates rant !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Andrew

[Martin Brown]

It shouldn't care. The system will boot off the nominated boot drive and only try alternatives when/if the primary drive fails. I have been known to have several OS's available depending on the chosen physical drive or sometimes active partition on one drive. Worst case it might ask you to choose between them at boot time.

One to watch is that some PC BIOSes have "Boot from USB drive" set as a higher priority than internal drives which may not be helpful.

It can be quite useful when things are misbehaving to have a sacrificial image of a working drive. These days virtual machines have largely supplanted the need to have several old OS's fully bootable.

Worth using a better third party back program then. Several free ones ought to be up to the task. Although I am loathe to recommend one just in case it doesn't work with your combination of hardware.

Way back we tripped over a 2GB boundary fault on a big system backup which happily made the backups to tape but could only recover the content up to the magic 2GB boundary when we hit trouble.

Not a happy bunny that day :(

[The Natural Philosopher]

That is the key issue. Boot order is set in the bios before the system even goes near a disk.

Once booted the 'old' drive will appear wherever it appears according to the particular operating system in use.

Two things to note, not all systems automount drives where you might expect them, if at all.

Secondly, I would say the MTBF of a commercial drive is around 5 years. If it older than that do you really want to keep it as an active device?

[Brian-Gaff]

I don't think it will be a problem. I've certainly done it on xp, so must be worth a try. Brian

[Michael Chare]

Typically you can go into the initial (bios) setup and choose the boot order i.e. whether to try diskette or CD/DVD first and then which order to try the hard drives. Sometimes you can press a button during the POST which then lets you choose the boot device - could be a USB stick these days.

Typically replacing a boot hard drive with an SSD will make the machine run faster.

[Hanny Z]

No.

[The Natural Philosopher]

By about a factor of 10 with a decent SATA interface on file reads, anyway.

That's what I have done - gone SSD only on the desktop. and a fanless video card as well. ONLY CPU fan and PSU fan left as 'mechanical' components.

Power consumption is also much lower now as well.

The main 'store everything (twice)' server is still spinning rust tho.

>

[Fredxxx]

It depends on BIOS and your MB.

Most BIOSes don't distinguish one hard disk from another, such that its pot luck which the system will boot from.

Having said that, most BIOSes then have a boot option screen where you can choose the disk itself with your chosen OS. But that has to done every time you boot the PC.

With luck and it boots up from the wrong disk, you can possibly swap the drive cables around to boot from the preferred disk.

[Chris French]

I don't think that's true, AFAICR all the PC's here do.

Certainly this PC lets you specify the boot disk in the bios.

But I'd have to go and check the others to be sure

[The Natural Philosopher]

that only works with IDE.

SATA tends to have some BIOS arrangement that actually detects the disks via some unique signature and asks you 'what order do you want to boot these' and stores the result in flash memory in the bios somewhere..

[Tim Streater]

All of this sounds exceedingly pathetic. Are you telling me that none of you has a Startup Disk panel in your System Prefs, which lists the bootable drives, allowing you to pick one?

[John Rumm]

No because the boot loader specifies the volume that should be booted by a combination of interface, drive, and partition.

It will either automatically allocate new drive letters to the partitions on the drive, or possibly none at all (you can allocated them yourself in the drive management snap in).

Never actually tried using system restore... did you have the external drive on a USB3 interface? (That may have required additional drivers to function correctly)

Don't hold your breath ;-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

Only Apple writes its own BIOS and has it guaranteed to be accessible in a fixed way from the OS

[Tim Streater]

EFI rather than a BIOS.

I thought the BIOS was supposed to be a standard?

[Andy Burns]

It's a dying one, last three machines I've bought have UEFI instead of BIOS

[The Natural Philosopher]

And there is no standard BIOS call for 'select and store next boot device'

UEFI is a sort of bios anyway. Its just got extra feetchas.

[Andrew Mawson]

No it was USB2, and not only that I could see all the files on it from the DOS / Command prompt built into the 'System Restore' disk, so the mechanics of reading seemed to function ok

Andrew

[Martin Brown]

If you only ever use 2D graphics and have an i5 or i7 the chips own native graphics are entirely adequate and even lower power.

Obviously it is very poor for 3D gaming.

I can't recommend the spinning rust with Intel SSD smart cache in front

- mine worked for just long enough to fail out of warrantee :(

I favour Samsung SSDs these days for fast speeds on incompressible data. Some makers game the benchmarks a la VW (what a surprise - NOT).

I still don't trust them and only use the to cache working files and OS.

[Martin Brown]

I have never seen a BIOS that doesn't allow you to specify the boot priority order and the first drive with a valid OS gets to go.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Ah well it just happens that it is a 3D game that suffers badly..;-)

I simply don't have much of a problem. Small files are cached in the clients own RAM anyway, on writes, and reads are as fast as the network allows - 100Mbs - so no faster disk is gonna help there.

I've got a kingston SSD for the OS only.

My data is too big and needs to be duplicated for safety anyway.

And access speeds for a single user or a couple is well fast enough on the rust.

But I think SSDS are now as long lived as spinning rust anyway,.