Switching harddrives

[rincewind44]

Hi,
I have at present 2 harddrives installed an working. Both are running windows 2000. I want to remove the smaller of the two and just boot from the second drive but when I remove the first drive and attempt to boot I get a 'NTLDR is missing' error. How can a solve this?
Thanks

 

[wolluf]

Your problem is the boot sector for both installations is on the first hard drive. You can create a boot sector for this drive, though you may have some problems with drive letters (I'm presuming the 2k on the second drive is on D:, E: or F: - not C when the first drive is removed.

Anyway - to create boot sector on second drive, copy the files ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini from the root of the first drive to the root of the second (they're hidden, read only system files, so adjust settings accordingly to access them in windows or use attrib command to remove attributes from a command prompt). Now start recovery console (you can do this with or without the first drive attached - might be better without). Once at recovery command prompt, type fixboot x:, where x: is drive letter as seen from recovery console. Now reboot - and it should boot from 'second' drive. Note - the second drive is now the first or only drive - so it will be booted by the menu entry which used to boot the first drive (you can edit boot.ini to remove the unwanted entry when all is working ok - it should look like this - unless you've already cusomiused the entries):-

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

You can remove the second entry.

Recovery console -

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;229716

PS - as I said, you may have drive letter issues. The 2k install on the 'second' drive may move to C: - which may stop it loading at all (if your pagefile is on another drive letter) and may cause registry problems. But it may just work as before. Just be prepared - you may end up doing a complete new install to achieve this satisfactorily.

 

[rincewind44]

Thanks for the help,
unfortunatley the chance that i might have to do a new install would be extremely awkward at the moment so I might leave it for a while. But thanks for the information.
It was very helpful