boot.ini on slave drive

[Guest]

I don't know how it happened, but i have XP Pro installed on my master drive (Maxtor 80GB) and when i removed the slave drive (40GB Western Digital Caviar) the computer would no longer boot up - it says "F1 to retry, F2 to enter setup (BIOS)". I need to get rid of the 40GB drive (WDC) to make way for my new 160GB drive (Maxtor).

I reinstalled the 40GB WDC and it booted fine. So i checked the drive in Explorer - I had deleted all the files from the 40GB slave, but checked the hidden files. I found that the boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetect.com, and ntbootdd.sys all reside on the slave drive. I checked uner Control Panel-->Administrative Tools-->Computer Management-->Storage-->Disk Management and it tells me that my 80GB Master Drive is Healthy (Boot), ie: the boot drive. And it tells me that my 40GB Slave Drive is Healthy (System), ie: the System Drive which means that it has system boot information (i therefore, luckily, could not format it)

So i copied the 4 files over to the Master (80GB Maxtor), removed the 40GB slave (set the BIOS to not recognize it), and still had the same problem. I made a new boot.ini for the master drive using the sample from the microsoft website and it still does not work. Any ideas on how to resolve this issue without having to reinstall XP on to the master drive? I'm wondering if the autoexec.bat or config.sys files are pointing to a D:\boot.ini (on the slave drive) such that i should point them towards the new C:\boot.ini on the master. (I don't even know if XP uses these things, i'm just remembering my old Win 3.1/DOS days). Any help would be appreciated as i'm clearly a novice at all this stuff. Thanks a lot.

 

[Guest]

Well, i tried booting from XP CD, got into the recovery console no problem. did the whole bootcfg /rebuild thing, seemed to go fine. Rebooted the computer (removed the CD), and still get the same error message.

Any other ideas besides reinstalling XP?

 

[Ron Sommer]

Did you make the drive active?
--
Ron Sommer

Well, i tried booting from XP CD, got into the recovery console no

problem. did the whole bootcfg /rebuild thing, seemed to go fine. Rebooted
the computer (removed the CD), and still get the same error message.

 

[Ron Sommer]

You don't say if the Master drive is C:?

You can put the slave drive in.
Boot to XP.
Go to Disk Management.
Right click the C: drive.
Mark as active.
Remove slave drive and reboot.