boot files to new drive

[James]

I recently bought a new hard drive. I have WinXP on my old hard drive
and commenced to install WinXP on my new hard drive using the WinXP on
my old hard drive, i.e. i formatted new drive and opened install disks
through old WinXP. I eventually want to use my new hard drive as the
boot drive; however the WinXP install was done as a secondary system.
The new drive contains no system volume that contains the files
necessary for booting. Firstly, how do I get a system volume onto the
new drive without reloading WinXP? Secondly, can I have two drives
each with WinXP on them and each with the boot files on them? Thanks.

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

You'd need to load the Recovery Console and run fixboot <newdriveletter>. By
design, there is only one active (or boot) volume on a system, so having the
boot files on both is sort of pointless unless you either switch the BIOS
boot order of the drives each time or use a third party boot manager to hide
each installation from the other. Once you remove the primary hard drive,
the installation on the second (new) drive may see itself differently due to
its new physical location on the system necessitating a repair install as
well.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org