Hard Drive won't boot

[Guest]

I used my main drive as a "slave" to transfer some files to a new drive. I
then needed to hook this drive up as "master" again but it won't boot to
WinXP installed on it. It tries, then the screen flashes, then it does a
reset and does it all over again. There is data on this drive that I can't
afford to loose. Is there a way I can hook it up as "master" OR "slave" and
"fix" the problem with WinXP CD ? If, re-installing XP on this drive is an
optio, can it be done without formatting the whole drive, therefore loosing
everything on the drive...again, I can't let that happen. The drive works
fine and I can access and transfer any file on it when it is in "slave"
position. The new master has XP on it also. Are there some files on the new
drive that I could replace on my old drive and get it to boot again ? Help !!

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

If it comes to it you can do a repair install. See:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315341
also consider using the recover console or download the Universal Bood CD
from
http://www.ubcd4win.com/index.htm and then burn the image to a cd.

 

[MGGP]

Have you tried to boot with only the original drive
installed and NOT the second drive ?

In most cases the BIOS is used to determine the drive
order, i.e., which drive to boot from 1st, 2nd, 3rd.

I'm assuming these drives are both ATA, not SATA.