Hi all
I'm having trouble with windows loader not showing a new install of windows 7 64 bit on a new drive.
Up until I put the new drive in I have one drive with windows 7 64 and another with windows 7 32bit.
Today I added another drive that has been partitioned and installed windows 7 in the first partition.
I had lots of problems with spontaneous reboots and blue screens. Now that all drivers have been updated
along with windows updates it seems to have settled down. 
The problem I still have though is when starting windows the windows loader is still showing me the two
versions of windows and not the new one. They are all sata drives. The new drive is fine now but I have to disconnect
the other two before booting up.
Any suggestions as to what might be the cause? Could it be something to do with jumper switches? 
There are none at the moment. Is windows loader even capable of seeing more than two os's?
I'm pretty sure it is but if not perhaps I need to install something like system commander.

Steve

I would say because they are not all different OS's. Further in the BIOS there should be a section where you state which drive you boot from first, if not that, then the second boot, and one harddisk is always the master (which is booted from) and the second drive is a slave drive if on the same SATA connection or even with using the connection in the computer which is always 14 for the primary connection and 15 for the secondary connection. Usually there is a DVD-drive in there somewhere which is actually probably marked as a master drive also so your computer can start from a DVD or start-up CD or the original OS's CD if they still include those. That means that the other harddisk if there was one would have to be a slave drive and those slaved drives can not be booted from, only from a master marked harddisk drive. As far as I understand.

It probably also depends on the licensing of the OS also but that may depend on using different computers instead of one computer. I doubt if Microsoft is giving away anything free except for patches and updates for OS's that don't always work correctly in the first place perhaps.

Thanks spacealf, I knew about the bios boot sequence settings but they didn't seem to be making any difference. You completely lost me what you talk about 14 & 15, I have 9 sata ports on my GA_X58A board.

Anyway I loaded acronis OS selector and so far so good, it sees all three drives and OS's and I can boot in to any of them now. I used to use it years ago and stopped because of problems with the MBR (master boot record) becoming corrupted that was allegedly due to acronis but I always much prefered it to using the windows loader as it lets you name each OS amongst other things.
The blue screens seem to have stopped although I have no idea what was causing them, I'm guessing it might have been a driver problem although I'm not convinced but since I updated pretty much everything it seems to have abated for now.

As for microsoft s licencing, I have read two articles, both from reliable sources, and both completely contradict each other about dual booting and the licence but since I was able to activate both copies on line I figured it was fine. 
It's absurd that they think I should pay for it twice when using it on one machine.


Steve

Just thought I'd give an update on my week of hair pulling woes and tantrums to let you know what the cause of it all was. 
After installing windows for a 3rd time and still getting continual blue screens at boot up I got hold of a little program called Who Crashed which reads the sys dump files created after a blue screen. 
Whilst it didn't exactly tell me what the cause was I did notice that on each blue screen the sys dump file would give me a completely 
different error message. Every time the crash was being caused by something different and it was just driving me crazy as the only thing that was new was the hard drive and disk checks revealed no errors. 
Then it came to me, the hard drive wasn't the only new thing, the sata cable connecting the drive was also new. 
It came in the box along with some other, "lower grade" cables. 
So I decided to try one of the "lower grade" cables and everything is fine now and I am up and running with no blue screens.     

So the lesson is, dodgy cables can give you all kinds of inconsistent errors and blue screens.


Steve