Trying to take Win2k out of the dual boot equation and just boot to XP

[badgerchief]

hello everyone. Hope you're all well.
I had Win2K on my machine as the main OS for a couple of years, residing on a 30GB HDD. Got to the point where I wanted to put XP on and figured a larger disk could be in order.
So I got another HDD and bunged XP on - the whole dual boot process has worked fantastically for about a year.
Now I want to get rid of 2K and reclaim the disk for some lovely linux usage.
I removed the win2k HDD expecting the boot loader to default to just one OS (XP) and simply boot up. Oh no.
I am 100% certain that I am booting from the primary drive in the BIOS and the jumpers are correct. It should boot from the XP disk. However it just tells me that there is Boot Failure from ide-0.
Put the Win2K disk back in and it's all great.

I know this is probably really simple, but I'm not sure how to proceed.

Any ideas?

Cheers

 

[iss]

try removing the jumper from the XP drive and booting with it as the only drive attached to the Primary IDE.

 

[IronDuke]

Sounds like it is looking for Win 2000. Did you edit boot.ini to remove W2K?

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Put that old disk back in.
It contains the boot-information for the whole PC. Specifically the files:
boot.ini
ntldr
ntdetect.com
cmldr (not always present).

You can delete anything else.
Then use e.g. Partition Magic to reduce the first partition to 1GB, at the start of the harddisk.
Convert the rest (again using PM) for Linux.
It should retain the boot-capability for XP and add Linux to your boot-menu.
You can edit boot.ini and take the W2K line out, if it has not already been removed.