My computer won't boot without the WinXP CD in the drive - please help :-)

[MidiGuy]

I've been messing around with my computer because of a problem I created by installing Win95 on a separate partition from WinXP Pro - AFTER I had installed WinXP! Long story short, Win95 is now gone (and that's how I want it), but I've been trying to straighten out the drive letters (I have separate partitions for WinXP, apps, data, and an extended partition with a single logical drive for whatever I want). After a lot of playing, and I think a mistake or two, I got things working. The problem is that whenever I take the WinXP CD-ROM out of the drive, it will no longer boot - it just says NTLDR missing, press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart the computer. But if I leave the CD in, and I don't press a key when it says Press any key to boot from CD, it boots to WinXP just fine!

Anyone know how to fix this?

And while I'm at it, if anyone knows why restoring my System State backup from before this whole mess started causes nothing but blue screens at startup - even in safe mode - I would love to know how to make that work!

Thanks!

-Midi

 

[altonb1]

This sounds like something in the boot menu is now pointing to your CD-ROm drive instead of your hard drive as the boot partition. I think if you edit your boot.ini file to reference your hard drisk, you'll be fine. You need to make the default boot device disk 0/partition 0 or something like that. I could probably figure it out if I was looking at it, but unfortunately I'm trying to remember the way NT worked and can't seem to remember the exact info. Hope this helps, at least a little bit.

 

[MidiGuy]

Here's the contents of my boot.ini:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

I don't think I see a problem. 🙂 However, I also have a second hard drive (with a single partition) in the system. While I was messing around, I hit Mark Partition As Active on that drive, and it still says that. Could that be the problem? That option is grayed out on C:...

 

[Superwormy]

format time...

 

[bruincal]

did you check your BIOS settings? try changing the boot order to hdd, floppy, and then cdrom

 

[mee987]

try setting cdrom boot to ON in bios, I think when you start the winxp setup you should be able to find an option to "repair ntldr" or something like that. Ive never used it, and i dont know where it is, but I really think I remember an option like that somewhere

 

[MidiGuy]

Praise the Lord! I finally have this issue solved! After trying lots of things, like repair options and all that, I finally looked in the BIOS. It allows you to choose a first, second and third boot device. I had the floppy drive first, the CD-ROM second, and HDD-1 third. It was supposed to be HDD-0 (I have two hard drives in the system). After I switched it, everything went ok. And I never had to completely reformat my hard drive! The data and applications partitions are still intact, although I still have to reinstall all the software because when I try to restore the WinXP System State from before, it will only boot to a blue screen.