How do you make a drive the boot drive

[Ryan]

I still have my old hard drive set for the boot up drive. how do I make another drive my boot drive?

 

[Ryan]

Does my post make any sense? Well, I'll try to explain it better I have the two hard drives connected to my computer. What I disconnect my old hard drive, I get an error message that says that I need to insert bootable media. My new hard drive is still connected. How can I make it soo that my new drive can be booted up from?

 

[leighd8]

sounds like the second drive is nott bootable?? tell us more.. what is on it what are on the two drives?? what do you want to do?

 

[Ryan]

Well, my previous hard drive come with my computer. It is a 6.4gb Quantum Fireball ST. it has Windows 95. Well, I bought a new hard drive, a 6.4 gb Quantum Bigfoot CY, and I installed Win2K on that drive. Now, I am trying to re-format my old hard drive, so that I can use the space on it. for some reason, Win2K is using some part of the old hard drive, and I can't re-format. I am thinking that I can't re-format because it is the drive that the computer boots up on. So, I wanted to make my new hard drive the boot-up drive, so I could see if that is why I can't re-format my old hard drive. I hope this makes sense.

 

[leighd8]

take out the old hard drive... boot to the cd rom, and do a fresh install of win2k, then set that new drive as the "c" drive and add the other drive as "d".. (ie master slave) then make sure that the bios boot sequence has C first and start it up... you should then be able tot start win2k and tehn you can reformat the older drive through that if you wish

 

[wildwolf]

Disconnect 1st drive, leaving only new drive connected.
1. boot from a floppy.
2. at command prompt, type: sys C: (this will copy system files needed for bootup onto drive C
3. put in disk that has 'fdisk' command, and run fdisk. Use the option to set a drive/partition active.

You should now be able to 'boot' to drive C:

That doesn't, however, mean that your OS will boot up properly. That will allow that drive to now be the boot drive.

 

[Magic30]

If all these posts does not help you (they are all right), you have to make sure, that your new drive is set to MASTER (jumper on the HDD). When you want to use both drives you have 2 possibilities:

1. BOTH drives on the primary IDE port:
the new one as MASTER, the old als Slave

2. using both IDE ports with one drive on each:
both set as MASTER, each connected to an IDE port.

If you have a CD-ROM/DVD, then set it to SLAVE and connect it to a port, where a HDD is MASTER.

I do not think, that setting a CD-ROM to MASTER gives a noticable performace boost.

 

[Ryan]

This is what the Disk manager looks like I am trying to change D: to the "system" drive. maybe this can help.

 

[Magic30]

You have to set the jumper for your second HDD so that it is primary master in IDE port 1.

 

[Ryan]

Alright, I'll try that!