Setting Partition as Active

[Guest]

Hi all,

I have a system that dual boots Windows XP Home (master hard drive) and
Windows XP Pro (slave drive). I removed the master drive to put it into
another computer and would like the current pc to boot from the slave drive.

Adter a lot of fiddling around I have wiped the first HD and have learnt in
the process that it was this drive that was active and had the MBR on it - my
PC refuses to boot from the slave drive because it previously booted from the
master drive.

I think my problem now is that I need to set the slave drive as an active
partition but I don't know a way of doing this without booting Windows. Is
there any way I can do it from the recovery console?

For information I have run fixmbr, fixboot, bootcfg /rebuild from the
recovery console and have copied ntldr and ntdetect from the installation cd
but none of this solves my problem, I think because the partition is still
not set as active.

Any help appreciated,
Many thanks/

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

The system has been installed to another drive letter than C: . It's not going to run from C, unless you did a very difficult set of
registry edits, not to mention the replacement of C, and fixboot-bootcfg to get that far. I don't recommend trying it.

You can put that drive in another system, 'take ownership' of the data, and save it to CD, then start over on the disabled machine.