format master/slave

[Guest]

I just formatted my master harddisc and now my pc does not start (errer at
startup:insert system disk and press enter).
yet my second harddisc (set as slave) had windows xp installed too.
normally i cuold choose which of the two harddisks i wanted to boot from.
what can i do to start windows?

cheers,

Xavier

 

[Kerry Brown]

I just formatted my master harddisc and now my pc does not start
(errer at startup:insert system disk and press enter).
yet my second harddisc (set as slave) had windows xp installed too.
normally i cuold choose which of the two harddisks i wanted to boot
from. what can i do to start windows?

cheers,

Xavier

Reset the drive jumpers so the second disk is the master and the other the
slave. Alternatively some BIOSs allow you to specify which hard drive to
boot from. If this doesn't work you may have to edit the boot.ini file or
perform some repairs from the recovery console. If changing the master/slave
jumpers doesn't work post back and let us know what you tried.

 

[JS]

If your boot.ini is missing or needs to be updated as your slave will now be
the Master once you change the drive jumpers.
See: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=289022

JS

 

[John Barnett MVP]

The master hard drive would contain the C: partition. having re-formatted it
you have deleted all the files, including the boot.ini, NTDetect and NTLDR.
If your second hard drive has another copy of XP you obviously had a dual
boot menu appear when you logged on, even changing the jumpers on the drive
will not restore the second copy because there would be no boot ini file on
the second drive, it relies totally on the boot ini on the master drive.
Visit my website http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org Click the Win XP Faq
button and look at question 10 'how to create an emergency startup disk for
XP' After creating the emergency startup floppy you will neeed to edit the
boot ini file on the floppy and change the disk parameters to point to your
second hard drive. You should then be able to use this floppy disk to access
your second hard drive. Failing that you need to re-install XP on your
master drive and then alter the boot ini file again to incorporate your
second copy of Xp on the second hard drive.

--
John Barnett MVP
Associate Expert
http://xphelpandsupport.mvps.org

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