problem removing second hd

[Guest]

I am having a problem removing the second hard drive I installed to try
another os. I have the other os off the hd which is reformated into 2
partitions. I have tried the safely remove hardware wizard but it does not
see this other hd. When I tried unhooking the hd and restarting I get a
failure to boot message telling me to insert my recovery disk. Every time I
do this it just wants to reinstall XP. This I do not want to do because its
recovery never saves the backup and I lose everything everytime. I need to
remove the hd to install it in another computer asap. I think my master drive
is missing a boot file but I cant find it and dont want to have to reformat
and reinstall. Note: my lovely computer only came with a recovery disk, not
an actual copy of win xp. How do I fix this?? TIA-Chris

 

[peter]

bad news..........your MBR on the boot disk was changed by whatever OS you
installed as a dual boot on the other drive...wanna give us some hints??
If you had a retail XP you would just enter the recovery console and type in
"fixboot" but...again bad news your "recovery" XP CD wont do that...so its
reinstall time.
peter

 

[DL]

Remove the primary hd and install as a slave on another sys, or via an
external caddy, to recover any data.
Then put back and start from scratch with your recovery cd

 

[Guest]

I put Ubuntu on the second hd. A freind brought over their copy of XP pro so
we could try the "fixmbr" but that still was not enough. right now I
"tricked" my puter by just swapping the second hd with another smaller one
but really this is only a temp. fix as I will not always get lucky like that
and want to know how to actually fix it. I wonder if I made a mistake when I
installed the second hd. I just plugged it in and booted up and windows took
it just fine.

 

[peter]

So what your saying is that the system boots with a blank 2nd HD installed
but not with no 2nd HD installed???
Have you ever changed the boot order in the BIOS??
peter