Boot problems

Nick Kaufman

protector of human kind from spoilers
Lifetime Member
SoSH Member
Aug 2, 2003
13,410
A Lost Time
Ok here's the problem:
 
1. I just put together a new pc I was building for a friend and I was just initiating the process of testing it out.
 
2. Said computer doesn't have a dvd drive.
 
3. About a month ago, I installed windows 8 on an extra SSD I had laying around on my default PC. This made my computer a dual boot machine. I kept Windows 7 as my default OS for my default pc, while I had win 8 set up for my friend.
 
4. I took the SSD in which I had Windows 8 installed and put it on the new computer. However, computer will not boot with it, giving me an error about missing boot files. 
 
5. I took back the Windows SSD to my default machine. I went to msconfig and I stupidly deleted Windows 7 from the boot menu thinking that this might solve the problem.
 
6. Not only it didn't, but now I am unable to boot to Windows 7 on my main machine.
 
Therefore, I ve got two questions:
 
a. What is the easiest way to make my pc boot on Win 7 again?
 
b. Given that the new build doesn't have a dvd drive, how can i solve its boot problems?
 
Thanks
 

Nick Kaufman

protector of human kind from spoilers
Lifetime Member
SoSH Member
Aug 2, 2003
13,410
A Lost Time
Never mind, found a an easyboot utility and it solved both problems. Basically, the boot manager was saved on win 7 drive, thats why i couldnt move the win 8 drive to a new computer.
 

Nick Kaufman

protector of human kind from spoilers
Lifetime Member
SoSH Member
Aug 2, 2003
13,410
A Lost Time
Yeah, I didn't really understand how the boot drive thing worked before tbh. The UEFI and legacy stuff throws me off too. On the plus side, the easy boot program was really easy though.
 

Couperin47

Member
SoSH Member
I understand the technical advantages of UEFI and GPT formatting, but in practice, in a home environment, using anything but legacy BIOS and MBR provides zero advantages. You get incompatibilities with tons of useful utilities, it's not actually faster and who the hell needs/uses a boot drive that's bigger than 2 Tb ?