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How to make a Hard Drive Bootable?

Kelemvor

Kelemvor

Lifer
Howdy,

This is sort of a OS question I guess... I have a hard drive that I add to a laptop as a secondary drive. It is used for ghostly and has the standard DOS boot files on it. Problem is when I tell the laptop to boot from it, it just skips it and boots normally.

This drive was created by copying the files off a different drive used for the same purpose but which boots up just fine.

Is there a certain file or something that makes the computer realize it can boot off a drive instead of just skipping it? Can't seem to figure this one out as it's got all the same files on it as the other HDD that boots up just fine.

Very strange.
 
Just copying the files won't make it bootable. The drive has to have a boot sector created with MBR, and that is usually always done when it is formatted to start with by using the /sys switch.
 
Yeah, that's what I was afraid of. I tried using the Sys command but that didn't work either. Is there any wya to add that in without reformatting the drive?
 
The partition must also be maked as "active", usually by fdisk. Marking a partition active tells the MBR that there is an operating system on that partition and it can look for one. Only one partition can be active, and it must be a primary partition.
 
You can have multiple active partitions, but we only try and boot to the first active partition we find. You can set that in disk management.
 
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