Need some help with removing dual boot

[DaiShan]

Ok, from the beginning this project has been hell. My father asked me the other day to put in a new hard drive for him because his old one was "making funny noises" (which I now attribute to the fan, but he wants a new hard drive, so in it goes) so his old configuration was a 20gb harddrive set as drive d with xp on it dual booting with a 13gb hard drive with 98 on it. I made a backup of his xp drive on my 80gb and restored it to his 40gb using powerquest drive image (there were several steps in between, which I will omit as they were pointless time wasters.) So now I boot up with the 40gb in place of the 20gb with no other changes, it boots up fine, everything is as it was with the exception of the hard drive being twice as large. I do an xcopy /c/h/e/r/k of his old pc to a old_pc folder on his 40gb so he won't be missing any files etc from that, and because I want to take out the 13gb hard drive as I have other uses planned for it. That all goes well, so I shutdown and unplug the 13gb and reboot and it will not boot sayin that there is no boot device (in bios the controller for which the 40gb is on is set to primary boot device) I have edited the boot.ini to set the selection time to 0 and remove the entry for Microsoft Windows (the 98 install) One thing I did notice was that the boot.ini as well as ntldr was located on the 13gb drive, which is C:\ so I copied them over to the root of the D:\ still no dice, I've wasted two days off and am well on my way to wasting today on this problem. The computer works fine when the 13gb is plugged in, just not when it isn't, I know it has to be files on that drive that need to be put on the root of d:\ or something along those lines, I just can't seem to figure it out (dual boot isn't my forte) Thanks for any help.

 

[PrincessGuard]

Do a repair install of WinXP without the 13GB installed.

 

[DaiShan]

Repair installation is not an available option, recovery console is, but I have windows running, so if I need to copy over necessary files I can do so with out the use of the recovery console.

 

[WarCon]

Did you happen to use fdisk to make that 40gig drive active? You have to have an active drive to boot.

I think you might need to do a repair install as PrincessGuard is saying to fix the boot files though, but maybe not.

 

[DaiShan]

This is a 100% perfect copy of the original drive, it is an active ntfs partition, and runs windows xp fine, my only problem is when I try to remove the 13gb it says insert a boot disk, I'll read up on it, I forget which boot files I need, repair installation is not an option in my xp install btw. Thanks for the help anyways guys.

 

[WarCon]

If the WinXP install (don't go to the repair console, go to install) doesn't find a valid XP install then I think you may be stuck repartitioning that 40 gig drive into 2 partitions and imaging the 13 gig drive to the first partition and imaging the older 20 gig to the second partition.

It isn't as simple as moving the boot information (the drive had to be made bootable first anyway - bootstrap information (this makes it the system drive) ). You can't just pick up XP and move it from partition to partition, which is what you would be trying to do. (Move it from D: to C: )

You really do need to do a repair install to accomplish what your trying to do. (Not sure if your software would survive it either)

Edit: I am willing to bet if you didn't make sure you custom installed every piece of software you use in XP to the D:, then there is probably software on the old C: that belongs to XP anyway so you would need to deal with that problem also.

I say its time for a backup of all important data and then a "fresh" install and yes I know how much that sucks.......🙂

 

[kursplat]

configuration was a 20gb harddrive set as drive d with xp on it dual booting with a 13gb hard drive with 98 on it.

the boot information is on the 13 gig drive with win98. it is the boot.ini file.
the FAQ's are your friends
good luck


edit:spelling

 

[DaiShan]

Originally posted by: WarCon
If the WinXP install (don't go to the repair console, go to install) doesn't find a valid XP install then I think you may be stuck repartitioning that 40 gig drive into 2 partitions and imaging the 13 gig drive to the first partition and imaging the older 20 gig to the second partition.

It isn't as simple as moving the boot information (the drive had to be made bootable first anyway - bootstrap information (this makes it the system drive) ). You can't just pick up XP and move it from partition to partition, which is what you would be trying to do. (Move it from D: to C: )

You really do need to do a repair install to accomplish what your trying to do. (Not sure if your software would survive it either)

Edit: I am willing to bet if you didn't make sure you custom installed every piece of software you use in XP to the D:, then there is probably software on the old C: that belongs to XP anyway so you would need to deal with that problem also.

I say its time for a backup of all important data and then a "fresh" install and yes I know how much that sucks.......🙂

Yep, you were right, I would not have done the system this way had it been me but my parents took it to a computer shop to have a hard drive added one day instead of asking me to do it. Upon speaking more with my father he told me that he wanted to keep the 20gb in there to back up data for redundancy's sake, so what I did was image the 13gb to the 20gb and just put everything back the way it was. But yes, every piece of software is installed to D:\ only programs installed on c:\ are those that were on there when it was the primary drive running 98. Thanks again for the help guys.