How do I change the drive Windows XP boots from - Dual Boot

[Guest]

I have 2 installations of Windows on a laptop. Currently, the 1st HDD (C:
drive - permanently mounted) contains Windows XP Professional. The 2nd HDD
(D: drive - mounted in the expansion bay) contains Windows XP Home. The 2nd
HDD was added new at a much later time. Both are installed as cable select.

Currently, the machine will boot into XP Pro normally if the 2nd (expansion
bay) drive is removed. My goal is to switch the location of the HDDs and
permanently install my 2nd drive (XP Home) making it the primary drive. I
want to have the XP Pro drive mounted in the expansion bay because I don't
use it very often.

Simply, I want to swap the locations of the drives so I can use the CD-ROM
with XP Home.

So far I have attempted, without success, to physically switch the location
of the 2 drives, then use the Windows Repair Console (from and external USB
CD-ROM) and BOOTCFG to rebuild the boot.ini file. After I did this, I had my
XP Home install in the machine by itself but it wouldn't successfully boot
unless I reinstalled the HDD containing XP Pro. Is there a way to switch
these HDDs and get my machine to sucessfully start the XP Home install
without needing the XP Pro install in the machine? Unfortunately,
formatting/reinstalling either OS is not an option.

Thanks for any and all help.

Rick

 

[Ron Sommer]

Did you:
make Home drive active?
change the rdisk number from 1 to 0 for the Home drive in boot.ini?
add ntldr and ntdetect.com to the Home drive?