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I used to use PC a few years ago that had Windows XP installed on it (SATA hard drive). Lets call this hard drive “Hard Drive 1.”

I recently got a Dell Optiplex 380 this also comes with a SATA hard drive. Let's call this hard drive “Hard Drive 2.” This has Windows 7 installed on it.

I wanted to copy some data from Hard Drive 1 (the old one, with Windows XP installed) into Hard Drive 2 (the new one, with Windows 7). I removed the optical drive and plugged in Hard Drive 1 in it's place.

Now there is a weird problem.

If both drives are connected (Hard Drive 1 on optical drive port) then the computer will allow me to boot ONLY from Hard Drive 1. Windows XP starts loading and then hangs up in the end.

If I unplug Hard Drive 1 then the computer will boot from Hard Drive 2 (the normal way). But then if I plug in Hard Drive 2 in running computer, it will not get detected. I have tried trying to boot from Hard Drive 2 and immediately then plug in Hard Drive 1 before windows 7 finished booting, but this still doesn't show Hard Drive 1 after the desktop appears.

How can I get to boot from Hard Drive 2 AND see the contents of both drives after Windows has finished loading?

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  • Yea that is wierd... maybe try a USB SATA convertor. Possibly something to do with the drives sector sizes in XP but on the new machine... it should work.
    – Piotr Kula
    Commented Aug 26, 2015 at 18:53
  • In regards to Drive-1 always booting before Drive-2 when both are plugged in at startup, that may be because you're plugging it in where your BIOS expects to find your optical disc drive. Normally computers are set to boot from ODDs before HDDs (for installing a new OS, for example). Try checking the boot order in your BIOS/UEFI or just swap the ports you're plugging the drives into, see if that helps.
    – 8bittree
    Commented Aug 26, 2015 at 19:45
  • I thought exactly the same thing, 8bittree and went over to change the sequence in boot menu. USB and Optical Drive were indeed having boot priority over Hard Drive. But I did change that to put Hard Drive on the top and put Optical Drive in the lowest of the list. Still the same thing ...
    – Youstay Igo
    Commented Aug 27, 2015 at 6:25
  • The CD is using SATA port 0 and your Drive-2 is using SATA port 1, hence even if the HDD is set first in the boot priority in BIOS it will still boot from the first device available, which in this case is the HDD Drive-1 on SATA port 0. You can try connecting Drive-2 to the CD SATA port 0 and it should boot into Windows 7. Or you can spare yourself the hassle and get a simple USB to SATA adapter cable set and connect your Drive-1 via USB.
    – Techpumpkin_WD
    Commented Aug 28, 2015 at 15:10
  • Argh. I think I will have to do that @ Techpumpkin
    – Youstay Igo
    Commented Sep 4, 2015 at 14:56

1 Answer 1

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It is all about BIOS device order.

First, BIOS classifies devices in several categories, one being harddisks (including IDE and SATA, usually), other is optical drives, others are USB devices.

Then, within each category, only one device is elected to be considered for the choice of the boot device (the one you could eventually choose after pressing F12, for instance.)

It seems to me that in your case, the SATA port for the optical drive has higher priority than the SATA port used for the regular hard disk drive; thus only Hard Drive 1 is considered as a possible device to boot from.

Some BIOS setups (but not all) has another setting (in addition to the normal "boot order") which allows you to change the order of the hard disk devices; if your does, it is as easy as entering the BIOS setup with both drives connected, and adjust the order.

Else, I guess you will be required to exchange the plugs between Hard Drive 2 and the optical drive; when it works OK (this might require one or two reboots to let the OS adjusts its internal references, for instance in BCD), you could try plugging the Hard Drive 1 instead and it should work.

Also, plugging SATA ports while the computer is running is not a good idea (unless they are hot-plug ports with the relevant support in Seven, not impossible but definitively not usual.)

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