Vista still looks for replaced hard drive at boot up

[Inventor3006]

We cloned the dying hard drive and swapped it out, but now
at boot up we have to manually tell it to use the new drive.

Where in Vista do we remove that reference to the old drive?

[Inventor3006]

Went into the BIOS and reset the boot order and refreshed/updated the hard drive
list.

I think that fixed it.

[Medico]

If you have any further problems try an app called EasyBCD. This apps almost entire existence is to help with boot problems. Has received a lot of very favorable press.

[petrier]

A friend asked me to look at his laptop because when he powered on, he got a message that no Operating System could be found. I didn't see anything unusual in the BIOS and exited the BIOS. Lo and behold, the laptop booted into Windows 7. I'm posting under Vista because of the similar problem starting this thread and the laptop was originally loaded with Vista. HP provided an upgrade to Win7 and my friend did that and that's when he called me in to take a look.

Bottom line: The laptop fails to find an OS upon a cold boot but has no problem with a warm boot. I use EasyBCD on my desktop machine so I loaded it on his laptop. No joy. Same result. I left it in that state requiring a [Ctl][Alt][Del] after powering on. I didn't want to waste any more time digging in to this but if someone has a clue, my curiosity may get me involved again.

[MRCS]

Where in Vista do we remove that reference to the old drive?

I don't know how it is in Vista, but in XP you might also want to remove the 'ghost device' remnant. Go to Device Manager > View tab > Show Hidden Devices, then expand your Disk Drives. The old HDD should be grayed out. Right click on it and choose Uninstall.