I mistakenly did as per the thread title. The ssd on it's own won't boot without windows boot manager which has an entry for w7 and w7 home premium, w7 being the install on the ssd and, I presume, home premuim being the old w7 install on the hdd. I could remove this via msconfig but not sure if I should (yet). If I plug the hdd in it goes straight to the mbr on the hdd, launching grub and offering linux or w7 - the drive was my old os one which will now be just storage once things are up and running. My question is will FixBoot or FixMbr with just the ssd plugged in make the ssd bootable, when the hdd is plugged back in or am I better off reinstalling w7 to the ssd, doing it properly. I'm assuming, of course, that the ssd doesn't have an mbr as it picked up the one off my hdd? thanks.
I think you're better off reinstalling W7 to the SSD with the HDD unplugged. It will give you peace of mind after installing.
You should just be able to create a new bcd within the SSDs installation. Boot from the SSD then run an elevated command prompt and type Code: bcdboot c:\windows /s c: That should create the necessary boot files on the SSD. Then type Code: diskpart list vol sel vol x active where x is the volume number of C:. Then shut down the PC, take out the HDD and it should all boot up as normal from the SSD. I think anyway, it's been a while since I've faffed with OS booting.
When you install windows and another drive has boot files instead of reinstalling them on the new drive it just uses the ones from the other drive....then you remove that drive and it wont boot as you can see. put in the windows CD and choose repair my computer when its done try and boot... if it don't work do the repair again and it will boot. You really don't need to do a fresh install for this little issue. you could also fix it from the recovery console with these commands Fixboot Fixmbr
In case anyone else comes across this issue, the easiest way to fix it without re-installing is to perform a startup repair via the install disc: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows7/products/features/startup-repair