I have recently put in a hard drive that ws in my pc as a usb hard disk, I
have installed windows XP on the disk but it won't boot from this disk. I
have to insert a bootable cd room and then boot my hard drive from here.
Without the boot disk in the cd rom it wont boot windows and says please
install bootable disk. Any ideas appreciated.

Nishy wrote:

> I have recently put in a hard drive that ws in my pc as a usb hard disk, I
> have installed windows XP on the disk but it won't boot from this disk. I
> have to insert a bootable cd room and then boot my hard drive from here.
> Without the boot disk in the cd rom it wont boot windows and says please
> install bootable disk. Any ideas appreciated.


Is it possible to see the disk in Disk Management? If so, how is it
identified, i.e., is it a primary partition? And active? And also
annotated as the "System" partition?

OTOH, it might be unfortunate that the HD from the enclosure was set
up as an extended partition. One might want to consider re-doing the
installation of XP from the very beginning, after wiping the HD clean.

Hi There thanks for the reply:
In Disk Management it is identified as Simple, Dynanmic NTFS Health (System)
but not primary. My attached USB hard disk is identified as Primary. How do I
make the c: Primary??
I did reformat the drive many times and also created a Partion which is
170GB and marked as unalloacted, how can I also utilise this partition. Many
Many thanks.
"GHalleck" wrote:

>
> Nishy wrote:
>
> > I have recently put in a hard drive that ws in my pc as a usb hard disk, I
> > have installed windows XP on the disk but it won't boot from this disk. I
> > have to insert a bootable cd room and then boot my hard drive from here.
> > Without the boot disk in the cd rom it wont boot windows and says please
> > install bootable disk. Any ideas appreciated.
>
>
> Is it possible to see the disk in Disk Management? If so, how is it
> identified, i.e., is it a primary partition? And active? And also
> annotated as the "System" partition?
>
> OTOH, it might be unfortunate that the HD from the enclosure was set
> up as an extended partition. One might want to consider re-doing the
> installation of XP from the very beginning, after wiping the HD clean.
>

Nishy schrieb:
> Hi There thanks for the reply:
> In Disk Management it is identified as Simple, Dynanmic NTFS Health (System)
> but not primary. My attached USB hard disk is identified as Primary. How do I
> make the c: Primary??
You have to set up this partition as primary at the very beginning.
There is no possibility to change later. So reinstall xp and set up this
drive as primary. Due to limitations of windows the other disk can not
be there as you do it since xp only wants to see one boot partition.

> I did reformat the drive many times and also created a Partion which is
> 170GB and marked as unalloacted, how can I also utilise this partition. Many
> Many thanks.
If unallocated this is not a partition. A partition is not marked as
unallocated space. Take the disk management to make a partition from it.
Click right on the extended and choose 'make logical drive' or something
similar (I don't know how it is really named since I'm german and have
german xp version).
> "GHalleck" wrote:
>
>> Nishy wrote:
>>
>>> I have recently put in a hard drive that ws in my pc as a usb hard disk, I
>>> have installed windows XP on the disk but it won't boot from this disk. I
>>> have to insert a bootable cd room and then boot my hard drive from here.
>>> Without the boot disk in the cd rom it wont boot windows and says please
>>> install bootable disk. Any ideas appreciated.
>>
>> Is it possible to see the disk in Disk Management? If so, how is it
>> identified, i.e., is it a primary partition? And active? And also
>> annotated as the "System" partition?
>>
>> OTOH, it might be unfortunate that the HD from the enclosure was set
>> up as an extended partition. One might want to consider re-doing the
>> installation of XP from the very beginning, after wiping the HD clean.
>>
greetings
Manfred