Making XP Pro drive bootable

[pnwsurf]

I started with 1 drive, W2K Pro. Then I added a second drive & installed XP Pro on it, as a dual-boot system. I can boot into either drive.

Now I want to remove the W2K Drive and use XP as the sole drive.

When I remove the W2K drive, adjust the jumpers on the XP Drive, and tweak the BIOS settings to make the XP drive to Primary Master with no slave, I get a DISK BOOT FAILURE error message.

If I reverse the process, it goes back to a successful dual-boot system.

I created a boot.ini for the XP drive. Didn't help.
I notice that the W2K drive has io.sys, msdos.sys, ntdetect and ntloader, but the XP drive doesn't.

How do I get that XP drive to boot as a Primary Master without the W2K drive existing as a crutch?

 

[soaplover]

The easiest way is to boot with the xp cd with only the xp disk installed as primary ,and do a repair installation .The other disk can be insalled later . This would take care of it ,remember to do windows update afterwards .
///Soaplover

 

[wolluf]

A bit quicker - just copy files ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini from root of 2k installation to root of XP installation. If you want it to just boot XP on its own (single disk), edit boot.ini to look like:-

[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 Professional" /fastdetect

Now, run recovery console (with just XP disk in machine), and use the fixboot x: command (where x: is XP drive letter as seen from recovery console). XP should now boot on its own (this process creates a boot sector for it - currently on 2k installation has a boot sector).

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