Dual Boot drive failure, add boot info

[Guest]

So.. I had WinXP Pro installed on a drive in my computer. I had old stuff
from school installed on it that I couldnt easilly save off or install on a
new system, was like alpha/beta stuff. So I installed a new HD and added an
OS (winxp pro again) to that, making a dual boot system. As I understand,
most of the boot info was on the original drive, and is thus not added to the
new drive (or I chose that as an installation option, I'm not sure,
regardless, it's not there).

Now my original drive has crashed leaving me with no HD that is bootable,
though I have one with a fully operational OS, if I can just get it to boot.

Is there any KB article on this or can anyone help me? I've searched around
but not found anything directly applicable to this. I'd rather not mess
anything up by trying out fdisk /mbr type stuff unless I'm sure thats whats
needed. Surely someone out there has had this issue before, or removed the
'main' HD in a dual boot system?

I tried to contact MS help, but they ask for a PID, and when I click "where
do I find my PID" they tell me to run stuff on windows.... only, if I could
run windows, I wouldnt be there asking for support!! :\

Please help,
Thanks,
Josh

 

[peter]

Pull the crashed HD out
Place 2nd HD in the 1st HD cable location
Change settings on back of 2nd HD from slave to master
place XP pro CD in CD
restart system...........push any key to boot from CD
start a new installation...........look for the screen that says repair
present installation.
this will correct the boot sector files and you will be able to boot into
XP.

peter

 

[Guest]

This was first thing I tried. HD is on CSL tho, but works fine. Will try
again, maybe I didnt go through with the 'repair' as I wasnt sure it wouldnt
break anything, dont recall, will try it (again) though. Thanks for reply.

I've also tried a bootcfg /rebuild, and got a boot.ini file constructed, but
it still doesnt work. Also played with BIOS to make sure it was trying to
boot from that drive, and it should be fine. Set it to boot HD0, HD1, HD2 in
sequence, and "boot other device" is on. In BIOS the HD shows as master of
secondary controller (CDRW and DVDRW are master and slave of other IDE
channel).

 

[Guest]

The initial sequence of "Deleting file..." was a bit un-nerving. Lets hope I
dont lose stuff .

 

[John John]

Try booting it with a floppy boot diskette:

http://www.nu2.nu/bootdisk/ntboot/

Let us know if you can start it with the floppy boot.

John

 

[John John]

PS. Try the diskette boot but leave the failed drive where it was!
Don't change the drive arrangement or else the boot may fail or go in a
continuous reboot loop. Being that the operating system was installed
on a different drive than the system drive it will have to remain as
such unless you reinstall the operating system from scratch.

John

 

[Guest]

Heh, ok will try putting back how it was. Already moved it around a bit and
tried adding boot info to it. Nothing I cant undo I dont think, other than
the windows repair that someone suggested, no idea what that did, or how to
undo it, but it didnt help whatever it did.

 

[John John]

Put it as it was and try the floppy boot diskette. Because the
operating system was installed when another active partition (System
Partition) was present the files NTDETECT.COM, ntldr and boot.ini were
installed on the first hard drive and the rest of the Windows files were
installed on the second hard drive. At that time the drive enumeration
was done and the Windows installation was enumerated on a drive other
than "C". That cannot be changed, by trying to remove the first drive
and replacing it with the second drive you are in fact trying to make
the second drive into the System drive where NTDETECT.COM, ntldr and
boot.ini will reside and at the same time change the drive letter
assignment from "Whatever letter" to "C" for the Windows installation.
That cannot work, the windows drive has to maintain its drive letter
assignment if you want it to boot and operate properly. If the first
(System) drive is dead you have to replace it with another drive, make
it bootable and place the NTDETECT.COM, ntldr and boot.ini files on it.
The boot diskette can act as the system drive providing that you do
not change the hard drives around, leave the dead drive there for now
and see if you can boot with the diskette.

John

 

[Guest]

The boot disk worked, unfortunately I had tried the other suggestion of a
windows repair, so when it booted, it started installing windows. Will see
what happens now I guess.

 

[John John]

Well, your data files should all be still there, so worse comes to worse
you can salvage and back them up then remove the dead drive and move the
good one to position HDD0 and do a proper clean reinstall. Or you can
boot off the boot diskette for the time being and see how the
installation behaves then decide what to do. Next time something like
this happens you know that you can use a floppy boot disk when the
startup files get damaged or lost.

John