Installation problems

[Ray K]

I'm trying to do a clean install on a newly formatted hard drive that
will go into my g/f's computer by putting it in my computer and
installing W2K Professional. (I temporarily removed my second CD burner
and installed her drive in its slot. It showed up as drive H: (my two
other drives have several partitions).) After that's done the plan was
to remove the drive from my computer and install it in her computer.

1. Is there anything inherently wrong with this plan? In other words,
does a drive have to be in its final computer while installing W2K (or
any other OS)?

After removing her drive from my computer, I booted my computer. Just
after the POST, I am forced to make a choice of W2K operating systems to
start, even though at this point there is only one W2K installation (on
c.

2. How do I prevent this interruption to the boot process?

When first booting her computer, I got a message that NTLDR was missing.
I returned her drive to my computer (which also uses W2K professional)
and copied onto it from my c: drive the following files: boot.ini, ntldr
and NTDETECT.COM. Returning this drive to her computer and booting, I
get to the black screen that says Starting Windows, but can't get past
it to the Windows splash screen.

3. When I installed W2K on her drive while it was in my computer, why
didn't W2K create boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com?
4. How do I get her computer to complete the booting?

Once I do get past the black Starting Windows screen, I imagine that
I'll again be offered a choice of which of two W2K systems to install.
That may be because she how has two hard drives. One is c:, with the new
installation of W2K. The other is d:, which has a copy (but not an exact
image) of her old c: and my attempts to install W2K on it.

For what it's worth, my c:\ folder has the following files that do not
appear in her c:\ folder: IO.SYS, 0 bytes; MSDOS.sys, 0 bytes;
AUTOEXEC.BAT, 0 bytes; CONFIG.SYS, 0 bytes; and devicetable.log,
5KB.Both c: drives have pagefile.sys files, both 737,380 KB.

And yes, I made sure the master/slave jumpers were in their correct
positions (slave in my computer, master in hers).

Thanks for your help.

Ray

 

[John John (MVP)]

The very short answer is that what you are attempting won't work, you
must install Windows on the computer on which it will run.

John

 

[Ray K]

John,

Not the answer I was hoping for, but I was afraid that would be the problem.

Any ideas what I can do with my computer so startup doesn't make me
chose from two W2K installations, even though I only have one (as
described between question 1 and 2)?

Thanks,

Ray

 

[Dave Patrick]

Remove the option from C:\boot.ini

Post it along with which one works and we can help you with it.


--

Regards,

Dave Patrick ....Please no email replies - reply in newsgroup.
Microsoft Certified Professional
Microsoft MVP [Windows]
http://www.microsoft.com/protect

 

[John John (MVP)]

The boot menu information is obtained from the boot.ini file. This is a
read-only, hidden system file, you need to edit the file and remove the
line that points to the invalid operating system:

How to edit the Boot.ini file in Windows 2000
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311578

You can also do this quite easily with the Windows XP msconfig utility
which works fine on Windows 2000. You can download the utility here:

http://www2.whidbey.com/djdenham/Msconfig.htm

After you place the utility in the System32 folder you can launch it by
entering msconfig in the Start Menu Run box. In the utility click on
the Boot.ini tab and have it check for and remove invalid boot paths.

John

 

[Ray K]

John,

Not the answer I was hoping for, but I was afraid that would be the
problem.

Any ideas what I can do with my computer so startup doesn't make me
chose from two W2K installations, even though I only have one (as
described between question 1 and 2)?

Thanks,

Taking the extra line out of the boot.ini file solved the problem. But
there was a lot of grief before success, because my experimenting with
boot.ini disabled my computer before I was able to read John's and
Dave's suggestions.

After fiddling with the boot.ini file, my computer refused to boot,
giving this message: "Windows 2000 could not start because of a computer
disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected
boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware."

To make a long story short, it's important that in the lines immediately
before and after the [operating systems] line, the parameters between
the parenthesis ( ) be identical. Somehow, I had a mismatch between
those lines, and somehow rdisk showed up as rdisk(2) instead of rdisk(0).

Before I was able to get to boot.ini to fix it, I had to successfully
boot. To do that, I made a bootable floppy containing just three files:
ntdetect.com, ntldr, and a proper boot.ini, following Microsoft's
procedure. (Sorry, I can't find the link again.) Of course the bios had
to be set to boot first from the floppy and then reset to boot from the
hard drive.

Thanks, guys.

Ray