How to make a partition bootable.

[Guest]

Caveat: I'm a developer so I don't know much about OS configuration.

Here's my issue: I have a PC with two hard disks. I have WinXP Pro installed
on a partition on each disk. As long as Disk 1 is in it's bay, I can choose
which operating system to boot from. If I remove Disk 1 -- so I can say put a
data disk into that bay -- Disk 2's OS will not boot. The machine does not
recognise a bootable volume.

If I move Disk 2 to the other bay, it is still not recognized as a bootable
volume.

What can I do to make Disk 2 boot without Disk 1 being present.

Thanks for your help.

(e-mail address removed)

 

[Kerry Brown]

Caveat: I'm a developer so I don't know much about OS configuration.

Here's my issue: I have a PC with two hard disks. I have WinXP Pro
installed on a partition on each disk. As long as Disk 1 is in it's
bay, I can choose which operating system to boot from. If I remove
Disk 1 -- so I can say put a data disk into that bay -- Disk 2's OS
will not boot. The machine does not recognise a bootable volume.

If I move Disk 2 to the other bay, it is still not recognized as a
bootable volume.

What can I do to make Disk 2 boot without Disk 1 being present.

Thanks for your help.

(e-mail address removed)

I think that you will have to redo the installation of XP on disk 2. There
are many problems with your current setup with the hardest to overcome being
that the boot sector is installed on disk 1. The easiest way to do what you
want is to setup XP on both disks while each disk is setup as the only disk
in the computer. Once this is done install both disks and edit the boot.ini
files on both disks so that they can boot independently or when both are
installed. You would need several entries in both boot.ini files to cover
all the different scenarios.

 

[AJR]

Boot.ini. which provides the OS option is on dusk 1 - remove it - no
option - no boot. Taking a guess - you probably get a message something
like missing ntldr, hal.dll or config sys - which indicates boot cannot find
the partition with the OS.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I have a PC with two hard disks. I have WinXP Pro installed
on a partition on each disk. As long as Disk 1 is in it's bay,
I can choose which operating system to boot from. If I remove
Disk 1 -- so I can say put a data disk into that bay -- Disk 2's
OS will not boot. The machine does not recognise a bootable
volume.

If I move Disk 2 to the other bay, it is still not recognized as
a bootable volume.

What can I do to make Disk 2 boot without Disk 1 being present.

Here's a stab:

Assuming that the OS partition on disk 2 is a Primary partition
and that it is marked "active", look just below the root for the
boot files "ntldr", "boot.ini", and "ntdetect.com". If they are not
there, copy them over from disk 1. If the OS partitions on both
HDs have the same partition no., the boot.ini file on disk 1
should work for disk 2. If you think the boot sector is not there,
use the installation CD's Recover Console to run "fixbooot".

*TimDaniels*