Weird one - can't boot straight from drive, only via DVD

[brammers]

I've recently popped an SSD in my machine to use as a boot drive. I reformatted and put Win7 on it - no problems whatsoever. The first time that I ran Windows however, I got the 'improper boot device' error. Putting the boot order back to run off the DVD, if I ignore the 'press any key to boot from DVD' message the machine will boot into the installed copy of windows. Whatever I try though, it won't boot into windows just being told to boot from the SSD.

The only thing that springs to mind is that the onboard RAID controller is in RAID mode and perhaps doesn't like having a non-RAID device as a boot device - but I don't see how I could fix that without losing my RAID data drive... That's just speculation though - could well be wrong. The SSD is on SATA port 0.

Any suggestions? Cheers!

[Englander]

I had the same problem once. Ran it for a few days as you describe and then it spontaneously fixed itself. A few days later I changed the boot sequence back to HDD first and it decided to work normally. I couldn't tell you what I'd done to make any change though... :/

[brammers]

Thanks Engander, but it's not reset itself yet. I'm sure that reformatting the C would get windows to boot off it without the DVD in the drive, but I don't really want to do that... Any more ideas?

[oolon]

How did you copy the system onto the new drive? Via an install disk or a copying program? It sounds like your computer does not have a boot block installed on it. Have a look at thread.

[jimborae]

Are you running with AHCI switched on in the bios, as this happened to me too when I installed my SSD and decided to switch from IDE mode to AHCI. IIRC the only way I got it resolved was to ensure that my SSD was on SATA port 0, other hard drives on the following ports .i.e. 1 & 2 and the SATA drive I had to shift over on to the ports controlled by the J Micron controller. Then ensured I had to ensure that the boot order was correct as it seemed to keep changing when I moved the discs and swapped from AHCI to IDE. This was on a DFI DK X58 T3eH6