Booting from slave 1

[smiffy47]

I have two installations of XP on my PC. One is on the Master Hdd. The other is on the first partition of a HDD that I have installed as Slave. Is is posible to boot up from this slave partition? If so, how do I do it, as I cannot see the slave HDD mentioned in the Setup/Boot menu?

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[Nelviticus]

When you made the second installation it should have modified the boot.ini file on your first disk to give you a choice when you boot.

I'm guessing that your slave drive is either from another PC or is an old drive from the same PC. If so, you'll need to add an appropriate entry to your boot.ini file manually - see this Microsoft article for instructions on how to do that. This article gives more info on the syntax of the line you need to change.

As long as you don't change the first entry, getting the second entry wrong won't mess your system up - it just won't boot if you choose the second item at boot time. If this happens, re-boot and choose the first item (which will boot from your master drive) then try re-editing boot.ini.

If the installation on your slave drive is from another machine then you will probably have problems once you get it to boot as all the drivers will be for the hardware on the other machine.

Regards

Nelviticus

 

[Freestone]

You could always try changing the boot order in BIOS to boot from your slave drive. This has worked for me in the past.

 

[smiffy47]

That's the answer! I was trying to do that before but had not worked out where to find the slave hdd Boot menu. Now we're motoring!
Many thanks, MIS Freestone.

Life...It's difficult not to take it personally.

http://www.crab.org.uk

http://www.hostinthepost.co.uk