Make Existing Drive Bootable

[Guest]

I have an external hard drive that is NTFS formatted. I need to make this
drive bootable without reformatting and deleting all the data. There used to
be format or sys commands to do this but I cannot find a way to do this in XP.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I have an external hard drive that is NTFS formatted. I need to make this
drive bootable without reformatting and deleting all the data. There used to
be format or sys commands to do this but I cannot find a way to do this in XP.

I assume that
a) You're going to make this disk an internal disk, and
b) It will be your primary master disk
c) This disk contains a working version of WinXP on its
active partition.

If so then you can do this to make it bootable:
- Boot the machine with your WinXP CD
- Select Repair, then Recovery Console
- Type these commands
fixboot
fixmbr
exit

 

[Guest]

Actually, it will remain an external drive. I want to be able to boot from
it in a recovery situation. My IBM Recovery software realizes it is an
external drive and offers to make it bootable but only if it deletes all the
data. In previous OSs there was a way to "transfer" the system files to a
drive to make it bootable but I cannot find one for XP. May be out of luck
without reformatting the drive.

 

[Ron Sommer]

The recovery software will be booting from the external drive.
XP can't boot from an external drive.
Can't you create a bootable cd or dvd?

 

[Rock]

Actually, it will remain an external drive. I want to be able to boot from
it in a recovery situation. My IBM Recovery software realizes it is an
external drive and offers to make it bootable but only if it deletes all the
data. In previous OSs there was a way to "transfer" the system files to a
drive to make it bootable but I cannot find one for XP. May be out of luck
without reformatting the drive.



:

How is it connected - USB? XP cannot boot from an external USB Drive.

 

[Unk]

I have an external hard drive that is NTFS formatted. I need to make this
drive bootable without reformatting and deleting all the data. There used to
be format or sys commands to do this but I cannot find a way to do this in XP.

If Windows formatted it as an NTFS drive, it is already "bootable", but not in the way you want.
The boot block is set to look for ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini

The only way to make it "stand-alone" bootable is to format it as a FAT partition in DOS then
use the sys command you mentioned. If you did that, DOS can't recognize the NTFS drive, and
wouldn't even assign a drive letter to it. You can't convert NTFS to FAT and keep the data.
You COULD backup the contents of the drive, let the IBM recovery software do it's thing, then
restore the data back to the drive....

You might want to learn a little more about NTFS. http://www.ntfs.com/

If you have access to a cd burner, see "Bart's PE Builder" (free). It will give you a complete
Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800x600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS
filesystem support. Very handy for burn-in testing systems with no OS, rescuing files to a
network share, virus scan and so on. http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

If you have the $$$$, you could get Winternals ERD Commander....
http://www.winternals.com/Products/ERDCommander/
This CD is pure gold for repairing dead systems.