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Booting from 2nd Hard Drive

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PaladinBrewer

Junior Member
Greetings,

Im home for break and trying to use my parents computer, and I brought my hard drive with me (dont ask!). Anyways, Im trying to put my HD in my parents computer, but I cannot get it to work. I have both HDs on the primary IDE channel. I have both HD jumpers set as "cable select", with my parents main HD at the end of the cord for master, and my HD in the middle one for slave. Now the BIOS shows both Hard drives. But I cannot get the computer to boot from it, nor is it under My Computer. In the BIOS settings where you set boot priority, it only shows their HD (and CD and floppy, of course), but does not show mine. My parents computer has Windows Millennium on it (ugh), and mine has Win XP Pro. Any ideas on what is wrong here?
 
From the soound of it the BIOS is recognizing your 2 drives so you hooked them up right. Then there are 2 other things to check, but I'm not sure in which order.

1. In the BIOS you have to tell it which drive to boot from. It WAS set to boot from your parents' original drive; if you did not change that, it won't look for yours to boot. But be warned: if you do change it and boot from yours, you will have to remember to change it back before you leave with your HDD in your suitcase!
2. Once in Windows it may not automatically search out and use all the HDD's in the system. Somewhere in Settings ... System... or close there may be a place to tell Windows to find and start using a new HDD.
 
1. In the BIOS you have to tell it which drive to boot from. It WAS set to boot from your parents' original drive; if you did not change that, it won't look for yours to boot. But be warned: if you do change it and boot from yours, you will have to remember to change it back before you leave with your HDD in your suitcase!
Click to expand...

Thats part of the problem, my hard drive does not show in the list under boot sequence in the BIOS, only the original HD does.
 
Unless your OS is set up for your parent's machine, it will probably only get a BSOD. Bootable drives are normally mobo and chipset specific.
 
I have already answered this very much in depth in a series of long post replies in O/S forum.
With Win ME - XP dual boot you need bootsect.dos file in root boot dir, plus ntdetect boot.ini and ntldr.
If I tell you what to do to see XP, you will lose ME.
 
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