WinXP won't boot without another hard-drive

[Pyramix]

I have two hard-drives. One has Win98 (an IBM 75GXP) and the other has WinXP (and several partitions). My IBM drive has been making a high-pitched shrill noise and I think it's ready to slip silently into its grave. So, I backed up all my data from that drive and disconnected it from the computer. However, now the computer won't boot, even though it detects the other hard-drive that has WinXP on it. It keeps going to the screen that says "Press a key to reboot." Any ideas how to fix this?

I plugged the 75GXP back in so that I could restart the computer and post this message here. But I honestly don't think I will be able to get much more out of this IBM drive. I ran msconfig and looked at boot.ini, but everything looks fine in there. It has information about both the OSes in there. So, why does it not boot with just XP?

 

[Pyramix]

bump

 

[bendixG15]

did u do the slave/master thingy ???

 

[Smilin]

Be sure bios is set to boot to the proper drive
From recovery console run a fixboot and fixmbr
From recovery console run "map arc" and then "type boot.ini" and be sure the proper arc path is being used.
Be sure ntldr and ntdetect.com are in the root of the drive.

 

[Bozo]

Aparently the IBM was the first drive installed in the PC. When the second drive was installed and XP installed on it, XP put the boot files it needed on the first drive.
If Smilin's suggestion don't work, re-install XP over top of itself. That should fix your problem.

Bozo

 

[Pyramix]

Thanks all. I will try out the Smilin's suggestions.