Adding a hard drive with dual boot

[Thanatoid]

I am trying to add a third hard drive to a system that dual boots win98 and 2kpro. 98 boots off of the 60gb IDE drive (full specs bellow) which is the master on IDE 1. 2000 boots off of a 37gb WD Raptor. Everything is cool until I try to add the 250gb IDE drive on the as a slave to the 60gb drive.

The error message I get when trying to boot 2000 is ".....couldn't start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <windows 2000 root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe.

The error message leads me to believe that bios is looking at the 250gb hard drive to find windows system files and not finding them. I've tried swithing the boot order in bios so that HDD 0 (the 60gb win98 disk) is first and SCSI (the win2k raptor) is second. I also tried disabling other boot devices and various other permutations, to no avail. Is it not possible to have the 250gb NTFS storage disk on the same IDE as the FAT32 disk?

I've run out of ideas. Finally, system specs:

mobo: Abit NF7-S
OS: win 98 SE and Win 2kPro
hard drives: a) Seagate barracuda IV 60gb 7200rpm IDE
b) Western Digital Raptor 37gb SATA
c) Western Digital Caviar 250gb IDE

 

[Thanatoid]

Just one bump then I'll leave it alone.

 

[Bozo Galora]

you're trying to slave a paralle IDE drive to a SATA drive on a SATA controller?
didnt that mobo come with a serillel converter?
also - make sure have RAID disabled, might be looking for O/S stripe on second HDD

 

[Thanatoid]

I have the storage drive (the 250) as a slave to the primary master (the 60gb booting win98). There is a SATA to IDE converter, but my 250gb is an IDE, and I'm stuck with it. I'll check on the RAID in BIOS and post back. Thanks.

 

[Bozo Galora]

if you used the 2K install to be your dual boot manager (not third party) then it installs a boot.ini in C root. There is also a ntldr and ntdetect file.
Your boot ini now says your "second" drive has Win 2K, but your third drive has win2k

dont even know if win2k has repair console, but if so you can try a bootcfg_/rebuild ......... AFTER 250GB has been formatted and partitioned

heres an old boot.ini from one of my dual boots:

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

I could show you what to change, but any mistake would give ntldr missing message, making whole system unbootable

We are also exposed to the dos drive letter assigning protocol here. Primaries are assigned drive letter first HDD0 - HDD1 etc., then logicals HDD 0 - HDD1 etc.
If you have a primary on the 250GB, thats another prob.

Edit: and the 250Gb MUST be configured as slave with jumper and in middle of cable

 

[Bozo Galora]

http://support.microsoft.com/d...?scid=kb;EN-US;Q289022

 

[Thanatoid]

Thanks alot for your help. I ended up reinstalling 2k on the raptor and everything was roses from there. I have one small remaining problem. I now have 2 Win2K entries as options when I boot. I need to get rid of the second of these. Problem is, the link you posted is for XP. In 2000, when I go to Properties->Advanced->Startup and Recovery, there is no "Settings" there as there seems to be in XP. Will I have to edit boot.ini manually. I was not able to find it and would be nervous altering it. Is it on my 98 install (C), which I installed first or is it on the 2000 system disk. Thanks for your help.

 

[Bozo Galora]

its on c root (win 98)

edit: you can post it here if you wish
you have to delete the Win 2k entry that references to disc 1, since disc 0 is win 98, disc 2 is now disc 1

but for chrissake - save it (and NTLDR) on a floppy first

 

[D1gger]

Yes, the boot.ini file will be on your C:\ drive (Win 98) it may be marked readonly. It is a simple thing to edit it and delete the duplicate win2k entry with notepad, but look at the two entries carefully before you delete one, to ensure you delete the old entry. I usually make a copy of the boot.ini --> boot.oldini before editing, then I can simply restore if I screw it up. My boot.ini looks like:

[boot loader]
timeout=5
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 /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional x64 Edition" /noexecute /fastdetect
c:\flinux.bin="Fedora Core 3- 64 Bit"