Multiple Drive Boot

[rnwmp]

I have 3 HD's in my system, I boot from a 20g, which my kids use , and I
have a 30g, and a 60 g that others use.

I had recently reformatted the 20g, which seems to eliminate the boot
choices for the other 2 hard drives. The way I had it, was that the 20g
booted up, and gave me 3 menu choices, and depending on which one I
selected, depended on which hard drive I went too, I was ok with this and
want to put it back the way it was. The last time I had to re-install
windows on the other drives before the boot menu was seen on the boot (20g).

Is there away to fix this without reinstalling wiindows on the 30g and 60g,
so that the boot on the 20g will see it??


Thanks for you input.......

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, rnwmp.

You can "do it yourself", or let the Recovery Console do it for you. ;^}

To do it yourself, go to System Properties | Advanced | Startup and Recovery
Settings. In the top portion, click the Edit menu. This will open
C:\boot.ini in Notepad so that you can edit that file. No matter where
WinXP is installed - or how many copies you have installed - the boot
process always begins in the first partition on your first HD, almost always
C:. WinXP's few "system files" (ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini) must be
in the Root of this drive (C:\).

As you will see, C:\boot.ini consists of two main parts. The top section,
labeled [boot loader], has just 2 lines: the timeout setting for how long
the boot menu stays on your screen and the default= setting for which OS to
boot if you don't choose otherwise. The bottom section, [operating
systems], lists all the choices available. Since you reformatted your first
HD, the other choices may not have been recreated correctly. You may have
only a single line, matching the Default line above. You should be able to
create those other choices by copying that one line, then editing it to
point to the proper HD and partition and the boot folder on that partition.
For most computers, change the rdisk(#) - starting with zero for the first
HD - and partition(#) - starting with 1 on each HD. Edit the label within
the quotes so that YOU can tell which is which; the computer will ignore the
label.

Or, with your HDs all plugged in, boot from the WinXP CD-ROM and run the
Recovery Console's FixBoot command. This should detect all your WinXP
installations and update C:\boot.ini for you.

All this assumes that you are using Microsoft's native dual-boot system. If
you are using a third-party solution - such as Boot Magic or BootItNG - I'll
let someone else help you.

RC

 

[Midnight]

You need to edit the boot.ini file to point to the operating systems you
have. If reformatting your 20g hard drive eliminated your choices that
suggests that it was the boot drive and had the necessary files on it. If
you only have Windows XP (or Win2000) you can boot from the windows XP CD
and run bootcfg. This will search your hard drives for operating systems and
update the boot.ini file as needed. If you run the command bootcfg /? you
will see what switches (options) you have. If you are running any 9x system
bootcfg won't find them and you will have to manually enter the details.

Repost with spcific details of operating systems you are running and what
drive letter they are on. There are too many variables for me to tell you
what to do without more detailed info. If you had three installations of XP
bootcfg will find them.

Midnight