Any performance decrease if boot sector on storage disk?

[RedDog75]

Just a quick question. Had a HDD problem when I was working on installing a new vid card & PSU. Lost the boot sector, so did a clean install (or what I thought). I had used fixmbr to get the files copied from my primary HDD to my storage. I was able to boot into windows after that

The problem is that after reinstalling win2k on my primary drive, it did not install a boot sector (maybe I did something wrong). Either way, the computer is running fine except I have to tell my BIOS to boot from my storage HDD so that my primary HDD with win2k will boot up.

Am I losing any performance/speed by doing this? Is there any issues with booting from one drive to another with the OS on it? Would there be any benefits to this?

Just fishin' for answers. Thanks everyone!

 

[Pariah]

You don't install a boot sector (master boot record). It's always there. A hard drive is pretty much useless without one as it contains the partition information for the drive as well as the boot program that the BIOS loads to begin the boot process for the system.

 

[RedDog75]

??

The drive shows up as "non-bootable" under HD Tune, and I also can't boot into windows unless I set BIOS to first look in my storage drive.

If I set it to my primary drive, I get a BIOS error message (i.e. no OS found).

??

EDIT: I do not have a dual boot option - only one OS installed, & its on my primary drive

 

[Pariah]

I'm not really following what you did from the description above. But, if your primary drive is not being detected as bootable that means you don't have a primary partition on it set to active. Which means you can install the OS to the drive, but the actual boot process is run off the first drive the system found with an active primary partition (your storage drive in this case). The problem you have is not tied to a boot sector error, you don't have control over that area of the drive. Beyond any inconveniences, there should be no performance penalties from your current setup.

Edit: the boot sector of the drive has no performance features, effects, etc.

 

[ohnnyj]

The same thing happened to me. I have two Raptors in a RAID0 array that I wanted to install XP on and it did so...mostly. It put the boot sector (i.e. ntdlr, boot.ini, etc.) on the storage drive I had attached. If you don't want it to do this everyone suggested unplugging the storage drive during the OS install and then reattaching it after it has completed. I wish I thought of this earlier as I think XP actually formats a drive much faster.

 

[tk11]

You won't suffer any performance loss.