Creating a System Boot Disk

[xiecs]

A friend has bought a two disk machine without an operating system installed. The larger disk was already formatted as a system disk and the smaller disk unformatted. I started up the installation of Windows 7 and during it, deleted the larger disk. I then formatted the smaller disk and installed the operating system. Once installed I then brought the larger disk back on-line.

However it appears that the smaller disk has not been formatted as a system disk by Windows 7 and therefore it won't boot directly from it.

How do I set this as the system disk?

[djr33]

You should be able to set the boot order in BIOS-- hit F8 or F12 or F2 (it seems to vary by system, I'm not sure on the logic behind that) while booting. In fact, it should say "press F2 to...." somewhere in the process, if very quickly.
Also, it may be possible to set this while installing windows.

If you already know all of this, post a bit more info and hopefully someone who's more experienced than us will be able to help you with it.

[xiecs]

If I go into Disk Management on my own machine, my C: drive is set as:

Healthy (System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)

But on my friends C: drive, the word System is missing. This means that when the system boots, he gets the following message:

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

I assumed that during the Windows 7 installation, it would format the disk it was going to install the system on as a system disk, but apparently not.

The C: drive is specified as the first boot drive in the BIOS. The boot order is specified as CDROM, HardDrive. Therefore, if I put the installation CD in the CDROM drive, but ignore the the request to press ENTER to boot from it, it will boot from the C: drive without any problem. But it won't boot from the C: drive without the install CD in.

How do I make the C: drive a system disk so that it boots OK?

[neel networks]

i would suggest format it again if you do not have any data on it...... make sure you only insert the single disk that you want the system to be loaded on to and once its installed and runninng i would say shut it down and attach the other disk to it. and format if needed.