system partition xfer, remove old OS.

Question

awhile back I added a hard disk as primary 1 (NTFS, partition D) and installed XP on it.   My original hard disk is primary 0 (Fat32, partition C) with ME on it.   Both disks are set to cable select.   The original disk is the system partition, and the new disk is a boot partition.    So when I boot with both disks with cable attached everything is fine, I get the OS select screen, all okay.  I would like to now remove the old disk (primary 0, FAT32, system partition C) and just boot directly from the new disk.   However when I detach the old disk I get the message that hard disk 0 not found, F1 to continue, F2 for setup. I assume the problem is that the system partition is still on the old disk (boot.ini, ??, etc) and that somehow I must transfer this to the new disk for everything to work okay.    Or maybe I'm just don't know what I'm talking about. I've tried detaching the old disk and attaching the new disk to the end of the cable (primary 0), but still same message & no luck. Any ideas on how to accomplish this?   I would like to re-format the old disk to NTFS & use as file storage. Thanks in advance for help! Gtwarrior

fredha · Answer

The boot.ini file is on the HDD with ME. You may be able to do a repair installation of XP to put the boot.ini file on the XP drive.

gtwarrior · Answer

how do I do a repair installation?

gryjhnhpe · Answer

I think startup only searches for boot.ini on a active partition so have you tried deleting the old HD partition , copy boot.ini 1st to new HD partition with Default OS as XP & use Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management to set new HD partition as Active.
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Edit:
See info link
http://www.compphix.com/xpbootprocess.html

Message Edited by gryjhnhpe on 02-16-2004 09:03 AM

Windows General

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