re-installing windows (system reserved boot files)

[Pyrotenax]

Primary drive is SATA , hence Disk 0

 

[Frenchy]

my primary drive is sata, double checked, it is disk 1 though, I think its random though tbh

 

[vanthus]

it often gets assigned a drive letter when external media is plugged in or hotswaps are plugged in, just a bug in windows I guess. Everytime I plug one of my hotswaps in drive I appears on my computer too, without the hotswap though it doesnt have a drive letter assigned. Not sure why, but from reading around quite alot of people experioence the same with usb drives and hotswaps. Stupid windows is what I pout it down to lol.

Partition doesnt have to be on the same drive, infact I think the way windows 7 works (although im not sure) is that the boot sector doesnt even have to be on the same physical drive at all as the OS itself. Not entirely sure on this though, but my system at work has the boot sector on essentially c: along with linux, however the OS itself is installed on my secondary hard drive. Not reall sure why they do ti this way.

Yeah " Stupid windows" has had me pulling my hair out since 95
have some rep.

 

[onlynik]

here is a snapshot of my Disk management.



looks like the (I) is linked to the (J) drive?
oddly enough i deleted the (J) drive yesterday and reformated that and windows still boots so i dont think the boot manager files are on that.

OK , the reason you were able to format J: and everythign still works is due to the bootloader files being in a partiton of the physical disk which is a different partition to J:

I actaully don't like they way it looks, as to me, it looks like there is a 1TB drive connected to SATA 0, a 500GB drive connected to SATA 1 and a 1TB drive connected to SATA 2. The reason I don't liek it is that you have increased your chances of issues with Windows. The Boot partiton and windows on different disks, well if either disk fails, you'll have an issue.

I wiuld also be curious to find out if all your disks are connected to blue ports on the motherboard or grey ports.

 

[movingtables]

thanks for everyones help but its all a bit beyond me now.

at the end of the day its all working i was just curious.

i have a windows 7 disk if i ever need to do a reinstall.