Maximum PC

Greetings all!

Okay, so this is another stumper, for me at least...

For some reason, a few months ago, I booted up and got an error of a missing bootloader or something.  

I did some research and found some tutorials on how to fix that, and I inserted my Windows disk in the drive and booted again...

But I got distracted and wasn't able to follow the procedure.

Much to my surprise, when I came back to my computer I was greeted by the normal desktop as if nothing was wrong... experimentation revealed that this happened every time.  If I tried to boot without the install disk in the drive, it would either tell me I was missing the bootloader or the OS.

I followed several repair procedures to replace the bootloader, none of which helped.

So, I left the Windows disk in the drive for a while until that started to annoy me and I reformatted and reinstalled windows from scratch.

Well, the problem remained, even on the first reboot if I took the disk out.

I tried installing windows to several different HDDs and had the exact same result.

I eventually got frustrated and decided the problem must lie (sp?) in some esoteric hardware malfunction, so I bought a new MB, CPU, and RAM and yesterday I installed them and fired up Windows...

The same thing happened.  Only, to make it better, when I put the windows disk back in the drive and rebooted, I can't boot at all now... it keeps wanting me to insert the Windows disk and select "Repair", but when I do so, it tells me that the Windows install is a different version and to please use the Windows disk that was used to install it.  

Ummm... huh? I only have one Windows 7 disk...

If anyone has any suggestions, please help!  I'm about to reinstall and never, ever remove the damn disk at all... which is NOT a solution I'm in favor of...

Thanks!

Specs are likely irrelevant since it's occurred on two basically different machines, but my new setup is an Intel I7 3820, an ASUS Sabertooth X79, and 16gb of Corsair Vengeance RAM.  Oh, and Windows 7 Pro x64...

A Kin, can you walk us throught he steps of installation? did you miss something perhaps? did you check you have the latest BIOS update (which sometimes causes the issue)

Little more info about you installation procedure. Secondly, why did you change the HDDs?

After the problem began, I installed windows to different HDDs to see if the problem was caused by the HDD I'd been using. Since it happened on each of the three drives I experimented with, I've pretty much ruled out an HDD issue.

I had the latest BIOS on both of the MBs I've encountered this with.

As for "walking through" the install procedure, well, I boot to the windows CD, use the windows installer to delete the partitions on the drive I'm going to install on, then have it format the drive, then install windows.

After the first reboot and the first time the desktop comes up, if I remove the windows disk from the cdrom drive, I can't reboot...

Did you check your boot sequence in BIOS? Make HDD primary and CD / DVD Secondary.

Also, Use the primary slot for HDD on motherboard for HDD and any other slot for CD/DVD.

Do you remove the Installation CD after the first boot or you leave it in?

The drives you are using are they SATA, SAS on RAID or SATA on RAID?

When you can not reboot, it only shows bootloader or OS missing error? nothing about no suitable media found? does it try to boot from PXE (Network) or CD / DVD before it gives you the error?

Let me know if it works or you still need help.