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This is a fairly new computer, only about a month old. i7 2700k, z68 motherboard, with a 1.5tb WD black HD, and a 128gb crucial M4 ssd.
I followed the instructions for setting up ssd caching, the SATA controller was set to RAID, I installed the intel software and enabled acceleration and it said everything went fine.
But when I went to reboot, I received the lovely "Reboot and Select proper Boot device" error message.
I checked the bios, and it was booting from the correct HD (I tried the only other option anyway just in case, it was the ~50 odd gb of unformatted space left on the SSD)
AFter that I entered the raid until (ctrl-i at boot) and removed the acceleration and deleted the raid array (because it was being used as a cache this was non destructive)
Still no boot. So I reinstalled win7 directly on the SSD, booted, and checked the HDD to make sure it hadn't been wiped. It hadn't, all the files were still there, including all the windows stuff.
I backed up my data to an external drive just in case, but I'd really like to get this install booting again.
I trawled the webs a bit, and have tried entering recovery mode and using the bootrec.exe
and bootsect.exe
to fix it, but to be honest I'm not sure what I'm doing with those.
My question is basically: How do I make my harddrive bootable again?
Kind of sounds like the boot device is somehow unavailable, what happens when you detach the SSD and boot without it? The commands you mentioned (fixboot and fixmbr, right?) should work, if not then there might be something else wrong... Maybe related to your RAID settings? – Tamara Wijsman – 2012-02-25T22:20:16.890
1I haven't tried detaching the SSD yet, but I have disabled it in the boot order. I will try that next. I've deleted all the raid arrays, but the SATA controller is still set to RAID. I tried AHCI briefly but that didn't help so I set it back to RAID. (Because I believe that's what it needs to be for SRT.) I'm running the built in repair utility and it's telling me the partition table doesn't have a valid system partition, but it doesn't seem to be able to fix it. – david – 2012-02-25T22:24:06.423
Update: I used the diskpart program to set the partition as active. Now I'm getting a new set of errors. – david – 2012-02-25T22:41:21.600
2Success... It booted. After setting the partition to active it just took a couple of runs through the automatic repair. Now I'm back to square one though. I still want to set up the SSD caching. – david – 2012-02-25T22:52:50.163
How about a link to those SSD caching instructions. – Moab – 2012-02-25T23:26:56.637
@Moab with the caveat that they don't actually work and will make your primary HDD unbootable? >< – david – 2012-02-25T23:35:51.110
@david You can post the link as a comment if you wish. – Moab – 2012-02-26T00:07:21.827
@david, on a side note, it looks like you have enough rep on SO to get the association bonus here - perhaps you need to clear and reassociate your account? – dsolimano – 2012-02-26T03:20:45.813
@dsolimano I've never managed to figure out how to get that bonus thing people speak of. I'm not terribly fussed either way though. – david – 2012-02-26T07:57:27.600