Problems Booting After 1 of 2 HDD Removal

[Guest]

Surely I'm not stuck with 2 hard drives...?

I had a good install of Win2k working fine on a single 80G hard drive, I
then installed a second hard drive (250G) on an ATA 100 controller card just
to try out XP Pro. I used the card because it would recognize the full 250G.
So I now dual boot to either 2k or XP Pro (SP1)...

Now I'm happy with XP (not gone to SP2 yet) and would like to remove the 80G
Win2k drive. If I do that, I get non system disk errors. I have tried
setting BIOS to boot from the SCSI device (the PCI ATA controller card), and
recovery console with bootcfg /rebuild. None of that worked.

Both drives are marked active. boot.ini resides on the old 80G Win2k drive.
Am I stuck? Is there a graceful way out? I would like to remove the Win2k
drive for use in another PC.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

You get the error because it cannot find the boot files (they are on the
drive you removed). Run fixboot from the Recovery Console on the remaining
drive.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Guest]

You may be stuck with two drives. Try removing the unwanted drive, and
re-install XP. This way, all the files are on the one drive. Then you can
re-insert the other drive.

BMR777

 

[Guest]

Once I can remove the original 80G drive, I don't want to put it back in this
system.

I did a fixboot and bootcfg /rebuild -- now it just reboots itself when I
choose the OS from menu (new menu built by /rebuild). Did I miss something?

Everything still works if I put the original drive back in on the onboard
IDE channel, so I'm still safe at this point

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I had a good install of Win2k working fine on a
single 80G hard drive, I then installed a second
hard drive (250G) on an ATA 100 controller card
[....]> So I now dual boot to either 2k or XP Pro...

.... would like to remove the 80G Win2k drive.
If I do that, I get non system disk errors. I have tried
setting BIOS to boot from the SCSI device (the PCI
ATA controller card), and recovery console with
bootcfg /rebuild. None of that worked.

Both drives are marked active. boot.ini resides
on the old 80G Win2k drive.

I would have thought that the Nutcase's solution
would have worked, i.e. fixboot. You may not have
a Master Boot Record on the 2nd hard drive, in
addition to the boot files not being there. Since
boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com work on the 1st
hard drive, why not just copy them over to the 2nd
hard drive? If having the 2nd hard drive at the head
of the BIOS' boot sequence doesn't boot the 2nd
hard drive directly (thinking that it's the 1st hard drive),
it may not have a Master Boot Record. Running
fixmbr may remedy that, but don't ask me how to
run it since I never have done it. BTW, in my system,
which uses a SIIG controller card, the hard drives
are listed explicitly in the boot sequence, and I put
the controller card itself last in the sequence - and
everything works as if there were no controller card.

If you get as far as the 2nd hard drive displaying
a boot option menu, you're practically home. All
that remains is to edit the boot.ini file to remove
the 2nd option and to reduce the timeout time to
zero.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Guest]

It all worked out! Thanks everyone, I am grateful

The fixmbr and perhaps copying ntdetect.com was the final fix. I didn't
check to see if ntdetect was already there, but I think it was. So maybe it
was just the fixmbr --> fixboot --> bootcfg /rebuild. No need to reinstall
anything...outstanding!

Thanks again and Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays in general!

I had a good install of Win2k working fine on a
single 80G hard drive, I then installed a second
hard drive (250G) on an ATA 100 controller card
[....]> So I now dual boot to either 2k or XP Pro...

.... would like to remove the 80G Win2k drive.
If I do that, I get non system disk errors. I have tried
setting BIOS to boot from the SCSI device (the PCI
ATA controller card), and recovery console with
bootcfg /rebuild. None of that worked.

Both drives are marked active. boot.ini resides
on the old 80G Win2k drive.

I would have thought that the Nutcase's solution
would have worked, i.e. fixboot. You may not have
a Master Boot Record on the 2nd hard drive, in
addition to the boot files not being there. Since
boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com work on the 1st
hard drive, why not just copy them over to the 2nd
hard drive? If having the 2nd hard drive at the head
of the BIOS' boot sequence doesn't boot the 2nd
hard drive directly (thinking that it's the 1st hard drive),
it may not have a Master Boot Record. Running
fixmbr may remedy that, but don't ask me how to
run it since I never have done it. BTW, in my system,
which uses a SIIG controller card, the hard drives
are listed explicitly in the boot sequence, and I put
the controller card itself last in the sequence - and
everything works as if there were no controller card.

If you get as far as the 2nd hard drive displaying
a boot option menu, you're practically home. All
that remains is to edit the boot.ini file to remove
the 2nd option and to reduce the timeout time to
zero.

*TimDaniels*