WHat is the diff btween system drive vs boot drive

[gwehrheim]

Here is the problem:
My C drive was my pre SP1/SP2 winxp system drives. I decided to re-install
windows on my drive D, with SP1/SP2 installed before I went live with it.
Now, after thoroughly testing the SP2 on my d drive, I want to get rid of
the C drive version. Drive C and D are physically separate hard drive
devices. I changed the boot.ini on the D drive, disconnected the old C
drive, and made the new D drive primary. When I go to fire up the system, I
get the message "ERROR LOADING OS" What am I forgetting here.......has to
be something obvious

so, let's continue this a bit furthur...............
drvie C is the system drive; drive D id a boot drive....what files make them
different. if I could make drive D a system drive without re-formatting it,
I think I'd be cured.

one way would be to take another harddrive, format partition C as a system
drive, and us the WD hard drive utils to copy everything over to the new
system drive.........would that do it??????? or am I still going to be
missinbg files

 

[Guest]

Why not install the drive to be C: solo,boot from xp cd,recovery,press enter
for password,then typeiskPart In DiskPart,delete the partition,create one,
then press:Esc Then type:FORMAT C: /FS:ntfs When its thru type:EXIT
Restart,reboot to xp cd,select,install xp,new copy.

 

[gwehrheim]

already thought about that .....but i would prefer not having to sit infront
of the PC re-installing xp and sp1/sp2

 

[David Candy]

Boot drive has windows directory, system drive has boot files. All MS OS's boot from C drive no matter where installed.

 

[Alex Nichol]

My C drive was my pre SP1/SP2 winxp system drives. I decided to re-install
windows on my drive D, with SP1/SP2 installed before I went live with it.
Now, after thoroughly testing the SP2 on my d drive, I want to get rid of
the C drive version. Drive C and D are physically separate hard drive
devices. I changed the boot.ini on the D drive, disconnected the old C
drive, and made the new D drive primary. When I go to fire up the system, I
get the message "ERROR LOADING OS" What am I forgetting here.......has to
be something obvious

so, let's continue this a bit furthur...............
drvie C is the system drive; drive D id a boot drive....what files make them
different. if I could make drive D a system drive without re-formatting it,
I think I'd be cured.

It is a piece of weird Microsoft nomenclature, that is quite the reverse
of logic

The System drive is the one that is initially booted as the Active
partition seen by the initial Master Boot code of the physical disk.
Contains the files needed to do the *boot* but is called *System*. It
is almost always seen as C except in very odd circumstances

The settings in boot,ini there point to the drive where the *system* is
installed in its folder (usually Windows). This is called the *boot*
drive.

Usually this boot drive is only different when you set up a dual boot,
booting a system that is in C and saying put the XP Windows folder in
D. The booted drive is still the original C

What you have done is have a system on your second device installed in
such a way, but there were *no* boot files on that drive. As well as
the fixboot and fixmbr you have done you need to copy two files from the
CD's i386 folder (ntldr and ntdetect.com) into the root of this drive,
and then run
BootCfg /Rebuild
from the recovery boot in order to build a new boot ini

There will also be a problem in that the registry entries will have D
in them, and will also be reflecting the old connection of the drive on
a different channel of the machine. You may find if you have the drive
on its own that it will refresh the channel data (and say new hardware
found) and that then after reboot the system will appear to be on C or
maybe even some other letter. You can put it back to D and live with
that using regedit.exe - at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\Mounted devices
d-click on DosDevices\C: in the right pane (or whatever other letter)
and very carefully change C to D.

But to get it all seen as a single partition and as C: would require
cleaning right off, deleting the partition and starting over

 

[JAX]

There is no need to install SP1 if you install SP2. SP2 has all
updates/hotfixes that SP1 has included.

JAX

 

[Steve N.]

Here is the problem:
My C drive was my pre SP1/SP2 winxp system drives. I decided to re-install
windows on my drive D, with SP1/SP2 installed before I went live with it.
Now, after thoroughly testing the SP2 on my d drive, I want to get rid of
the C drive version. Drive C and D are physically separate hard drive
devices. I changed the boot.ini on the D drive, disconnected the old C
drive, and made the new D drive primary. When I go to fire up the system, I
get the message "ERROR LOADING OS" What am I forgetting here.......has to
be something obvious

so, let's continue this a bit furthur...............
drvie C is the system drive; drive D id a boot drive....what files make them
different. if I could make drive D a system drive without re-formatting it,
I think I'd be cured.

one way would be to take another harddrive, format partition C as a system
drive, and us the WD hard drive utils to copy everything over to the new
system drive.........would that do it??????? or am I still going to be
missinbg files

You need to have Ntldr and Ntdetect.com files on the root of drive C:

See if this will help.

(From http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315233)

1. Start the Recovery Console, type fixboot at the prompt, and then
press ENTER.
2. If the Recovery Console does not appear, follow these steps:
a. Use one of the following methods to start the computer so that you
can access the file system of the boot partition:
• Specify another operating system on the Boot menu.
• Start from the Windows XP CD-ROM, and then at the Windows Setup
screen, press "R" to use the Recovery Console to repair the Windows
installation.
• Use a Windows NT 4.0 boot disk that also contains the Windows XP boot
files.
• If your boot partition is a basic disk that is formatted with the FAT
file system, use an MS-DOS boot disk.
b. Copy the Ntldr and Ntdetect.com files from the I386 folder on the
Windows XP CD-ROM to the root folder of your boot drive. The boot drive
is typically drive C.

If you are using MS-DOS to perform this file replacement, you may have
to remove the System attribute, the Read-only attribute, and the Hidden
attribute from the files by using the attrib command. To do this, type
the following lines at the MS-DOS command prompt, and then press ENTER
after each line:
attrib ntdetect.com -r -s -h
attrib ntldr -r -s -h

Steve