Windows XP will not load without XP CD in drive

I did that during a test run it was scary... But......... It worked

my MBR was messed up, but it worked on my test run

I did the fixboot and fixmbr just like you said but it still says "DISK BOOT ERROR, PLEASE INSERT SYSTEM DISK". Also I now have like 4 options to use to boot (one is blank in the name, two have XP in them, and the other is its default name) with because I accidently added 2 more in the recovery console before when i tried to fix them. You guys have any idea how I can get rid of the two of them? Ive also tried to boot first to Hard drive and switched between one being active and the other deactive and it finds neithers OS with one drive "on" the and other "off". It insists on having both drives active to even get to the dual boot screen or to recognize the XP cd to install.

This happened to me just today! O_o I had to go into the computer BIOS and change the Bootup pirorities from Floppy to CD-ROM, and load my Backup BIOs files. Infact, I don't really remember much of what I did. ._.; I guess I just got lucky. I hope I helped in some way.

i tried that too, about 4 times hopeing it would work,but it didnt. not sure if reloading BIOS would help though

Do you have another harddrive to test and see if is just that harddrive that has the problem. If you can load winxp on another harddrive try do so and then put the shady drive in as a slave (not boot) and try to see if you can see files from the other drive.

Then transfer the files from the shady drive to the other harddrive that works on boot.

madcatmk2123 said:

Windows XP will not load without XP CD in drive

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Very likely a timing problem. Try a different HD data cable. Worked for me.

Also, you might want to look here.

Regards, Martin A

Thanks for the input, would have tried them but I just got it to work before I saw your posts. I called up the guy who fixed it for me and he said that since I reinstalled home on the 200GB HD(secondary master) with the 30GB(primary slave) still hooked up with PRO installed that it messed with the MBR and that it doesnt know where to look for the directories without the CD in. So he suggested I put the both the CD-ROMS on the secondary IDE and the HDs on the primary IDE and set master/slave for each line. Then with the 30GB XP PRO unhooked from the ribbon install XP home again, then hook up the 30GB XP PRO after. Just installed Home now to type this and so far no problems although the other drive is still unhooked, im sure it wont casue a problem now as it has got this far, where before it wouldnt with one drive. Thanks for the help.

Why in the world do you have winxp home and pro. Why didn't you just upgrade home to pro. Home is kind of usless compared to the superior xp pro, plus to be safer in the future.

If you have xp home upgrade it to pro with the cd after you do a backup of home.

What I would do, as if you wanted to know, is to back up your data and apps, then nuke both drives. After nuking, place the 30g drive as master on ide1, and install your os there. Then install the second hdd (to be used for apps and storage) as master on the second ide channel or primary sata channel depending on the drive config. Then install the optical drives as slaves on respective channels.

Place a swapfile on each drive so paging reads and writes can occur simultaneously.

that's right never use two windows OS for safety reasons.
Safe configurations:

WinXP Pro and Linux
WinXP Pro and Win2000
Win2000 and Linux
etc, never use Win2000 or below NT is ok.