I popped another hard drive in my machine to diagnose problems with it, problem is the stupid computer wants to boot from that one instead of my regular setup.. why the hell does it do this? yes, I checked the boot order in BIOS settings. first thing I did. since these are hot plug-able I tried connecting SATA cable after windows 7 boots, but it does not detect it for some reason. I'd like to ask MS engineers why not! it does not show up in HD Tune or disk management.
let me re-phrase, how can I get the ntldr that I want? and yes, again, I set the boot order properly.
Get into your bios settings and enable boot menu. Shutdown your computer, plug in your second drive, power on computer, then press F12 (or whatever your boot menu button is). Select the drive you want to boot from.
Where did you connect the drive to, internal SATA or external eSATA Port ? If you connected it to an eSATA Port and your harddisk is not shown, this is a driver problem (probably you didn't install any driver, but in your case they are needed) It's not the fault of Microsoft only, if hotplug doesn't work. The BIOS has to tell the operating system, that the ports are hot pluggable too. If it does not, the operating system concludes they are not hot pluggable and acts accordingly.
internal SATA, is there a bios setting to make it hot-plugable? also, I can't get a boot menu to come up w/ my board does anyone know why it picks one HD over another to boot from?
ok, but I set up the boot order properly, why does it want to boot a partition on a disk that is lower in the order..? edit: i should say the hard drive I put in that I wanted to test had active partition w/ NTLDR, mine is Daz loader so it is GRLDR, correct? don't know if that matters.
All your SATA ports have numbers. Your test harddisk should have a number higher (so appears later in list in bios) as boot harddisk. Correctly configured, your boot harddisk should be on the FIRST SATA port (lowest number) and your test harddisk on a port with higher number.