Hard Drive Problem - Suggestions?

[blanco]

Have experienced a problem with my USB 3.5 external SATA drive enclosure - the surface
mount socket on the interface board has come adrift - I decided to install it in a spare
rack inside my desktop PC which has 5 Sata sockets on the motherboard.
Connected the power and data - rebooted. Windows attempted to load but failed showing
"BOOTMGR Missing". Rebooted and configured the boot sequence in bios for the CD Rom
as first boot device which on reboot enabled me to boot from a bootable partition manager
disc. This showed that the drive attributes had altered. The added drive was named "C" and
the original "C" drive containing the operating system (Win7) had changed to "D". So it
appeared that it was attempting to boot from the drive which had no operating system on it.

Using the partition mgr software I swapped the drive letters and rebooted to find I had no
post bleep and a black screen - no display. Rebooted and was unable to get into the bios
so I was stumped. Shut down, disconnected the added drive and rebooted. Now it attempted
to boot with usual screen boot display but failed again with "BOOTMGR Missing".
Inserted the Win7 install disc and selected "Repair". This repaired the system and on restart
had restored the hard drive to "C" and all was and has remained good.

Had not expected any problem connecting the extra drive internally, so what have I overlooked
or where did I go wrong ?

[dugimodo]

All you should need to do is change the hdd boot priority in BIOS, not the boot sequence which is usually separate but the order of the hard drives within that sequence. Changing the drive letter assignments will not help, windows ignores that when assigning which is C: generally and just gives that designation to the boot drive.

[Paul.Cov]

There may be TWO settings you need to change in BIOS.

One may be to direct the computer towards the device type to boot from - options being Optical, IDE, SATA, USB, Network and the other option, once set to SATA is to choose which of those SATA drives is the true boot device.

Changing the drive letters has probably only helped confuse the issue, but congrats on having the gumption to install the drive internally. It's the sensible move.

[blanco]

Thanks guys. Will have another go when I find time, noting what you
have said about setting the hdd priorities.

[linw]

Know what you mean about those stupidly attached USB sockets. There is virtually nothing holding them on. Bad/cheap design.

[blanco]

Working fine now. Reconnected second sata drive but this time booted into Bios
and selected from the two drives listed which one to boot from and saved.
Rebooted into Windows and all is good. All data preserved on second drive.
Thanks for assistance.

[Agent_24]

Know what you mean about those stupidly attached USB sockets. There is virtually nothing holding them on. Bad/cheap design.

Exactly, there's a reason the original USB connector was quite large... later on, only phones and such needed the smaller ones, which for some stupid reason ended up on many other things that don't need them as well.