Booting Help Needed

[NakaNaka]

Right now I have a Maxtor Drive and a WD drive. The WD is the master and the Maxtor is the slave. When I pull out the WD and make the Maxtor the master, I get MTLDR is missing. I've tried everything that people have said to fix that, and it didn't work. So I'm back to my setup with the WD as the master and the Maxtor as the slave. (Maxtor has WinXP by the way) - How do I make it so that when I remove the WD and make the Maxtor the master, it will know that it is booting to an XP ... because all the boot information is still on the WD. Do you understand? Please help.

Thanks

-Phil

 

[NakaNaka]

Also, I have searched in my whole computer and I can't find a boot.ini file . Isn't that weird??

 

[BiJiCool]

Do you see a startup menu when you boot?

Yes, then ther is a boot.ini present.


Normally it is hidden and read only, and its on the drive with the active boot partition.

Windows W2K/XP ALWAYS writes it's boot information in de Active Boot Partition (i.e. C drive, first drive)

When you want to boot from the maxtor, you have to make it bootable (yes, indeed, quit similar to the way you made a
floppy bootable in the old days 🙂 )

The easiest way I think is to rerun XP setup, and select "Repair Boot files". Of course, make sure that the maxtor drive is the first drive then.

 

[NakaNaka]

How do I repair boot files?? I've tried fixboot and fixmbr.

 

[obenton]

You'd also have to run fdisk and make the XP Primary DOS partition the Active partition. Even if you succeed in restoring the boot, XP might not like having had its drive letter changed from D: to C:, and might not go past the login screen.