Boot SCSI drive is D:/... primary ide is c:/ ... tried changing IDE drive, now getting NTLDR error... help!

[abu]

Hi guys, the title sums it up.

Firstly, im a scsi nubie...my 36gig scsi drive has XP installed and windows is reading the scsi drive as D:.... and my primary IDE as C:/.... How can i change this?


Secondly, I wanted to replace the IDE. When i did so, winxp would not boot since NTLDR was missing. I put the ide back in, and xp boots.

How can i but the NTLDR on my scsi?

Thanks for the help!

cheers

 

[DimZiE]

your XP system put the GRUB bootloader on the IDE so when you replace your IDE you won't be able to boot....

my guess is you had the IDE before the SCSI so even though you do a clean install XP would still set SCSI as D: and your IDE as C:

i think the only way is to do a clean reinstall without the IDE just the SCSI and. after everythings done put the IDE in..

hope that helps..

probably somebody else had a better way to solve your problem

 

[RichieZ]

I'm not sure about the NTLDR part of your question, but you can change the drive letters in administrative tools/computer management/disk management.

Right click on the drive and do change letter drive/path, something like that. Change the IDE drive to something else and then change your SCSI drive to C:

 

[mschell]

XP will not allow changing the boot(system) drives letter.
The problem is Win XP puts all boot info on the C: drive which is the first drive that gets the OS. Any other OS installed has no boot files, the boot loader on C: boots all other OS's on the system.
I'm currently trying to get a second installation of XP to boot as a primary OS with no luck, even after copying all the system files from a bootable C: partition.

One option that works in a fashion is using the files and settings transfer wizard to make a full backup of your present SCSI setup. Then reinstall WinXP after deleting the existing XP install on the SCSI drive, booting from the CD, you may have to hit F5 and load SCSI drivers. Once the OS is up and running open the Files and Settings transfer wizard and tell it to restore the backup file you (hopefully) stored on C: or any other drive on your system. The system will come back up pretty much the way you left it but it will boot like a one OS system. You can now disconect the IDE drive.

 

[lorlabnew]

abu,

I'm not 100% sure about XP, but could work (it does with Win2k and IDE drives); at least these would be roughly the step I'd try:

1/ Remove IDE drive from the system entirely and boot from XP cd-rom; choose repair . While booting from CD-ROM, you may need to supply XP with driver for your SCSI controller (hit F6 when prompted).
2/ From there you login into your XP installation, and run repair options (you might want to try fast repair, or if it fails, manual repair from console; particularly check out fixmbr and fixboot tools; fixmbr will write new master boot record while fixboot should restore system partition's boot sector. .... also, since you're using SCSI, you may need to re-create/adjust boot.ini to reflect your drive (your path should look similar to this: scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT ... these options are not really for beginners and you need to know a bit what you're doing, since Win2k/XP fast (auto) repair guesswork might not be 100% dependable.

Either way, you should backup your data before you'll proceed, don't blame me if something goes wrong

...you can add your IDE drive back later, but personally would wipe it entirely (including boot records) before you'll try to integrate it back, for instance under DOS with plain fdisk... XP could get confused again what to boot otherwise...

good luck
dave