I purchased a Microsoft Surface Go recently. The other day, it blue-screened and refused to start up again (cycling through the “Automatic Repair” screen and failing repeatedly). I write this as a reference for myself for how to fix this if it happens again, and also to explain some of the dead ends I encountered along the way.
(originally from https://web.archive.org/web/20150423071752/http://ajcsystems.com/blog/blog/2013/09/15/til-installing-windows-7-on-a-non-default-drive/)
Quick one: today I learned that, when installing Windows 7 on a machine with multiple hard drives, it will refuse to install to a drive which is not set as the default boot device in the BIOS.
It doesn’t tell you this is why it won’t install, of course. It just says “I couldn’t find a valid drive to install to, go read the setup log to find out more.” If you’re inclined to figure out this problem, you then have to Google around a bit to actually find the location of the setup log files, read them through “type setupact.log”, and then happen to run into an error that could be interpreted as being related to BIOS boot order.
Hopefully this note saves somebody the several hours that I wasted today on this. =P