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Changing default partition to boot to in WinXP?

S

staeiou

Member
I had a Parallel ATA hard drive that I had WinXP installed on. I got a Serial ATA drive, popped it in, and installed WinXP on that drive. After transferring all my files, I disconnected the PATA drive. Now, I cannot boot into Windows; I get the message "NTDLR is missing" when I boot. I am assuming that there is something on the MBR that WinXP needs to boot, because the partition is active.

Does anyone know how I can solve this problem without formatting and losing all my data on the SATA drive? Thanks!
 
"NTDLR is missing" is a message I get from my BIOS when I dont have a boot device available.
It sounds to me like your BIOS wont boot properly from a SATA drive.

Check your BIOS settings and see if you need to enable a few more things to boot from a SATA device.
 
How do you know the partition on SATA is active?
If you put the PATA back and boot, and use the disk manager in XP, you can see if it is active or not. Is that what you did?

Have you set the motherboard BIOS to make the SATA bootable?

Put the PATA back and boot and see what the content of boot.ini is on SATA. How about on PATA?
 
The SATA partition is bootable and active, or so says disk manager. I've been reading and writing to it, so I know it is a good drive. My mobo is a MSI K8N Neo2 platnium. I can go into a boot menu and choose which device to boot from. When I do this with the PATA drive, I can select which version of WinXP (the one that is installed on PATA or SATA) to boot. When I do this with the SATA drive, I get the "NTDLR is missing" error.
 
Souns like the SATA drive doesn't have a master boot record. You could try and and fix that using the recovery console from the XP CD. I think the command is fixmbr.
 
It sounds like when you installed XP, your PATA drive was active and installed XP on SATA as a dual-boot. This means that the drive letter on the partition on SATA is not C (C is the one on PATA. Even if you fix everything you can with master boot record and boot.ini, you will not be able to boot to SATA without the PATA connected.

I suggest that you backup everything you may need from SATA.
Disconnect PATA from the motherboard.
Re-install XP on SATA. Then, XP will be on drive C on SATA.
Then, you can connect PATA. With SATA bootable, the partitoin on PATA will take a different letter. So, you will not be able to boot to PATA. But, you will be able to copy any files from it.
 
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