W7 and vista dual boot hard drive issue

[Supraboost]

Hi all,

I have a very weird OS and hard drive problem that has been bothering me for years (ever since XP). I used to run a vista 32 bit on a 320gb Western digital hard drive. Then about 1 year ago I bought a Hitachi 1TB and installed new W7 64 bit inside. Since then I have been using the vista as a backup OS and general file storage in case W7 has some problems (I know I probably don't need that now given the capabilities of W7) and have only been running W7. Recently my western digital (the vista drive) start acting weird, like freezing during file search etc. so I figured its lifespan is probably up (about 3 years old). So to prevent the defective drive from interfering with the smoothness of my W7, I remove the hard drive cables and decide to boot from W7 (Hitachi) only. But when starting up I get "Load OS error" and cannot load Win7 at all. The only way for me to load Win7 is to connect the Vista drive, set that as the first hard drive to boot, and then it will go into dual boot selection screen where it ask me whether I want to boot into Vista or Win7. If I choose Win7 then it will boot up smoothly with no problem. If I choose Vista it will boot for 2 min and then it restarts (this is expected because this drive is defective. It is detected in the hardware manager and bios, but its contents cannot be searched or formatted in the windows interface).

So now I run into a situation whereby I cannot ONLY have win7. I need to always connect and boot the defective vista drive in order to use Win7. Is anyone experiencing this? I have a feeling this is a hardware issue but why cant the bios forget the fact I have a vista?

Currently I can run my win7 ok, it is just everytime I open up my computer my pc is using a lot of resource trying to figure out what is inside the defective drive..and u can hear the defective drive keep skipping. In my computer, the drive does shows up just you cannot open it or see what is inside.

Please help!!

[sorush.nazari]

I think your problem is because of Master Boot Record MRB. Its contain data about where your OSs are and how to boot from them. This MBR is currently on your vista drive and since you say you can boot your Vista drive for 2 min then my hunch should be true. So what you can do is to load the Win 7 cd and then go into Winodws recovery console and type FIXMBR,
/>http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx?mfr=true

That should fix the problem. Remember to remove the vista drive when you do this. What you can also do it to change the jumpers on the vista drive to slave and the w7 drive to primary master then as before in the recovery console run chkdsk d: /f to scan your vista drive for faults.