Issue with HDD upgrade

Hey guys,
So, on the advice of this very forum, I recently purchased a Hitachi 7K500 500GB drive to replace the non-OS drive on my ASUS G50V-A2 laptop. However, when I swap out the drives and try to boot up, I get a message that tells me to reboot and select the right boot device. I used Seagate's SeaTools utility to figure out which of the two drives was my OS drive, and replaced the other one with the Hitachi. Thinking I might have made a mistake, I tried using the other drive with the Hitachi and that returned a Windows Boot Error that asked me to use the Repair option from the installation disk. I did and nothing happened - it was obviously missing all of the OS.

I'm not sure if I'm supposed to do something before I can make the swap. I use Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit and my non-OS drive only has some software (games, etc.) installations and media files. I've already copied the installation folders to my Hitachi to save me the trouble of having to reinstall everything, but if I need to wipe the current drive clean, then I'm fine with that too.

Appreciate the help!

 

Is the boot order correct in the BIOS? The boot drive should be first in the list.

 

You sure it wasn't configured with the two drives as a raid array with two logical drive letters ?

 

@kosti: Yes, I went into the BIOS and changed the boot order to make sure that the Hitachi was second.

@BruBoo: Nope, did not configure the drives in RAID.

 

Its my understanding you cant simply "copy" your OS from one drive to another. You either have to clone your old drive, or do a fresh install on the new drive.

Things like folders and files you can copy, just not the OS.

 

I didn't copy the OS - only the games/software I had sitting on the non-OS drive which I want to replace. I am not replacing my main OS drive.

 

It gets weirder:
I tried booting with only one of my current drives in the laptop and with my OS drive, it returned an error asking me to reboot and select correct boot device, but with my non-OS drive, it gave me the Windows Boot Manager error asking to repair. If it helps, I just checked the hidden/system folders on the two drives and my non-OS drive has a Boot folder, but not my OS drive.

This is turning out to be more of a hassle than I thought - I figured that since I'm not replacing my OS drive, I could merely swap out the drives be good to go! If all else fails, I'll just reinstall Windows 7.