Trying to get pc to boot from different drive

bigjp

Member
Sep 26, 2005
25
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0
Hello all. Last night I had my first crash and it was ugly....well, I was anyway since it scared the crud out of me. I ended up re-installing Windows and figured I'd just go from there. Once I got rebooted I found that all my data was still on my hard drive, but the drive that my pc used to boot from was renamed (it was C before the crash). The drive that I installed the OS on was now named C.

I figured I'd just try and move things over and I did without problem. However, I'm having all sorts of problems with how things are working on my C drive now. I can't get Windows Update to work and many programs won't install at all. So after working on this all day I just decided to try and figure a way to make my old C drive the boot drive again. I've been looking and searching all over on how to do it, but I can't find a way to make this happen. I tried to use Partition Magic 8 (free version) to rename the drives, but it wouldn't take.

I really don't know if I will be able to boot into the old drive even if I can get it to try, but I'd still like to see if I can. I've been banging my head up against a wall with this thing all day and now I just want to go back to how I had it before. Oh yeah, I had system restore turned off, so can't use that. Any ideas on how I can get my pc to boot into another drive? Let me know what other info I can add to help solve this. Thanks!

If you can't tell already, I'm a newbie with all this.....:eek:

edit: I realized that I probably didn't need to do a fresh install afterall. I looked in BIOS and it showed my first boot priority as CD-ROM. I didn't change it to boot to that, but right before this happened my pc frooze and I had to do a hard shutdown (correct term???....pressed button until shut down). So this took me right to install when I put my Windows disk in....and since it wouldn't let me boot normally (and it was 2am) I just went with it. I really hate being a dumb-a$$ newbie!!! Still in need of some much appreciated help to get my system back to where it was before all this.
 

montag451

Diamond Member
Dec 17, 2004
4,587
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Hi,
If you can disconnect your excess hard drives, so that the one that you want to boot from is the only hard drive in the system, and that is jumpered as master on the back of the drive. AND on the primary IDE channel.

See if that does it.
If not, then do post back for more ideas/possibilities on how to restore your former happiness.
 

bigjp

Member
Sep 26, 2005
25
0
0
Montag, you are the champ! It worked and everything is cool now. I've read about others doing this or similar things for other reasons, but when it happened to me my brain just took a dump. Lots of this stuff seems like common sense when you read about it happening to othes, but when it happens to you (well, anyone who is new to pc building and trying to learn) all that stuff you read about kinda starts drifting away.

Thanks again for your help and contributing so much to this forum.