Replace Boot HD

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

Hi all,
My boot HD has been failing for some time. After a few tries it starts
working; I would like to replace it. The OS, and every file I need is on
another HD. I need this last HD to boot... I've been told this is
impossible... but it seems so easy to do........
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Pablo.
 
What you call that last HD is probably the first one or HDD0. Anyhow,
before the whole thing conks out and leaves you unable to start anything
get yourself a third party boot manager and see if it can do direct
boots. Once you have a boot manager you can then relax a bit and
carefully plan your move without having to worry about being unable to
boot the pc. You can try TeraByte BootIt NG http://www.bootitng.com/ or
XOSL http://www.ranish.com/part/xosl.htm Download one of these AND TEST
IT to make sure it can direct boot! XOSL is freeware, BootIt NG is
uncrippled freeware for 30 days. Nags after 30 days if you installed
it, runs forever on the start diskette, but if you decide to use it you
should pay the $30 or so for the license.

These managers do not necessarily need to be installed on HDD0 to work.
One of the drive/boot experts will tell you how to go about changing
the failing hard drive. Even if HDD0 were to fail I'm almost 99.99%
sure that you could shut it off in the BIOS or recable the os drive to
HDD0 and have w2k setup/repair make it bootable. Of course the experts
may come in and say that my margin of error of .01% makes this impossible...

John
 
Pablo Dana said:
Hi all,
My boot HD has been failing for some time. After a few tries it starts
working; I would like to replace it. The OS, and every file I need is on
another HD. I need this last HD to boot... I've been told this is
impossible... but it seems so easy to do........
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Pablo.
Click to expand...

If your boot disk does nothing other than boot up your PC
then it is easy to replace. Here is how you do it:

- Temporarily install a small hard disk (e.g. 500 MBytes) as
a slave disk in some Win2000/XP PC.
- Partition and format it. Set its partition to "active".
- Copy these files from the \i386 folder of your Win2000 CD
to this disk:
ntldr
ntdetect.com
- Copy the hidden file c:\boot.ini from your current disk to
the new boot disk.

You have now made a Win2000 boot disk. See if your machine
will boot with it!
 
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