Duel Hard Drives

[mmillett]

I am having some problems on my hard drives that use windows XP pro and home . I reformated the XP pro and left the XP home on my other hard drive. Now i am getting ntldr and asking me to hit CTRL,ALT,DEL to restart is there away i can change the boot sequence to make it boot to xp home rather than my XP pro ??

 

[wolluf]

Bit more info please. Which drive is primary master? Have you just got XP Home operating system installed now? What's the exact sequence of events, error messages when you try to boot?


PS. You could try making an XP boot floppy (as i don't know what's what, this will boot either hard drive, assuming XP is on 1st partition on each). Copy ntldr & ntdetect.com from \i386 on install CD to newly formatted floppy. Then create a boot.ini (use notepad) like this:-

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Disk 1" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Disk 2" /fastdetect

Copy that to floppy too - boot from floppy.

 

[mmillett]

the master is the one i deleted that had XP pro on it . And the second drive is XP home . I knew there was a utility for this . Thanks i will try that .

 

[wolluf]

If you were dual booting with XP Pro on drive 1, XP Home on drive 2, the boot sector (for both operating systems) will have been on drive 1. So, if you've reformatted this drive, you'll have lost boot sector - so XP Home won't boot without 'help' (that boot floppy should work - booting off disk 2).

To repair this properly, depends on what you are going to do (you haven't said if you're reinstalling XP Pro, intending to use just XP Home.....).

Post back if you need more help.

 

[mmillett]

I'm just going to use XP home . I'm a big gamer and don't need pro hogs so much resources .

 

[wolluf]

So, make it primary master. Copy ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini (looking like this):-

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home" /fastdetect

to root of drive. Then run recovery console (

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307654)

and run fixboot x: (where x: is drive letter recovery console sees XP Home on). Now reboot from hard drive - it should boot into XP Home (may be issues with drive letters/paging files - may be best to run with old Pro drive present as slave).

 

[mmillett]

thanks so much i will try it ..