Changing Boot Drive to avoid reformatting

[Ed Wood]

I recently added a 1TB SATA drive to my system. I have 2 additional drives,
both 250gb. One of them is a SATA drive, and the other is a standard IDE
drive. When I added the 1TB drive, I could not access all of the drives, and
bottom line, I had to reinstall Windows XP Pro. During the reinstallation,
the installation program said that I had a previous version of XP installed,
then proceeded to install XP on the 1TB drive.

All three drives are Western Digital. The WD Data Lifeguard Tools recognizes
the drives as follows:

Primary Master: 250gb - Drive E.
Primary Slave: 1TB - Drive C.
Secondary Master: 250gb - Drive D.

I would like to make one of the 250gb drives the boot drive c, without
having to go through the process of reinstalling XP again.

It there a way to accomplish this?

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[dadiOH]

I recently added a 1TB SATA drive to my system. I have 2 additional
drives, both 250gb. One of them is a SATA drive, and the other is a
standard IDE drive. When I added the 1TB drive, I could not access
all of the drives, and bottom line, I had to reinstall Windows XP
Pro. During the reinstallation, the installation program said that I
had a previous version of XP installed, then proceeded to install XP
on the 1TB drive.

All three drives are Western Digital. The WD Data Lifeguard Tools
recognizes the drives as follows:

Primary Master: 250gb - Drive E.
Primary Slave: 1TB - Drive C.
Secondary Master: 250gb - Drive D.

I would like to make one of the 250gb drives the boot drive c, without
having to go through the process of reinstalling XP again.

It there a way to accomplish this?

The second install of XP should have also created a boot menu. Did it? If
not, which drive is the system drive; i.e., which drive has ntldr and
ntdetect.com on it? Is there also a boot.ini file on that drive?




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dadiOH
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[Ken Blake, MVP]

I recently added a 1TB SATA drive to my system. I have 2 additional drives,
both 250gb. One of them is a SATA drive, and the other is a standard IDE
drive. When I added the 1TB drive, I could not access all of the drives, and
bottom line, I had to reinstall Windows XP Pro.

It's highly unlikely that you *had to* reinstall Windows, and almost
certainly you should not have. I don't know what caused your problem,
but you must have done something wrong, and there was very likely a
much simpler solution.

During the reinstallation,
the installation program said that I had a previous version of XP installed,
then proceeded to install XP on the 1TB drive.

Then that's one of the things you did wrong. Exactly how did you
reinstall it? Did you boot from the Windows DVD, as you should have?

All three drives are Western Digital. The WD Data Lifeguard Tools recognizes
the drives as follows:

Primary Master: 250gb - Drive E.
Primary Slave: 1TB - Drive C.
Secondary Master: 250gb - Drive D.

I would like to make one of the 250gb drives the boot drive c, without
having to go through the process of reinstalling XP again.

It there a way to accomplish this?

Sorry, no. You can not do this.

 

[Ed Wood]

I think the configuration of my system caused the aforementioned problems. I
am mixing standard IDE and SATA drives. I also have a DVD burner as secondary
on the IDE Line. I believe that the jumpering caused the BIOS not to
recognize all three drives plus the burner.

After removing the jumper pins and letting the BIOS automatically recognize
and assign the drive letters, everything is now working together, however the
"Boot" Drive (the 1tb drive) is listed as the Primary Slave drive.

Since this is the largest drive, my goal is to make the primary master drive
(currently drive e the boot drive, and the 1tb drive as a drive I can store
a clone copy of the boot drive on.

I hope this clarifies my situation.

 

[Ed Wood]

I am unsure, I will have to do some research to find them.

Thanks.