Make secondary (XP) hard drive bootable?

[conjur]

Ok...trying to help a friend out and my brain isn't thinking clearly.

He's got 98 on a C: drive and installed XP Pro on a D: drive but, apparently, the XP boot files are also on C:, not D:. He wants to take the C: drive out of his PC. For some reason, his PC won't boot the XP CD so installing off booting from that didn't work.

Is there a way to make that D: drive bootable into XP?

 

[Basie]

He should set the cdrom drive as first boot device in Bios and then do a Repair Install of WinXP.
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

 

[conjur]

Originally posted by: Basie
He should set the cdrom drive as first boot device in Bios and then do a Repair Install of WinXP.
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

his PC won't boot the XP CD so installing off booting from that didn't work.

If he could boot off the XP CD, he'd have taken the C: drive out first and just installed to the new drive.

 

[conjur]

I guess I'm just looking for the equivalent of the SYS command but for XP.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Boot to the Recovery Console from the XP CD, and run "fixboot", that should re-install the bootloader files. I'm not sure if you would also have to use the "fixmbr" command or not with it. Make sure that there is at least one primary partition and it is marked as bootable in the partition table, on the D: drive that is going to become the new C: drive. (Although, if it had XP installed when it was D:, the HD will still show up as D: inside of XP, with no C: present. Don't be surprised.)

Addendum: I don't know if "fixboot" also updates the hidden BOOT.INI file in the root dir, but if it doesn't, you will have to edit it manually to reflect the change in drives.