Problem with booting from 2nd hd with a second XP Installation

[mattiasj]

Hi,

I recently bought a new Seagate 160 GB S-ATA hard drive as my old IDE drive had begun showing signs of giving up. My plan was to install XP on the new drive and use the other one as storage for large files that I don't care for that much. I'm running P4 2.53 on ASUS p4v8x-x mb with 1 GB memory.

After having some trouble getting XP to detect the new sata drive I finally installed XP on it using sata drivers from a floppy (So there is now two drives both with XP SP2 home on them). The problem:

After I had installed XP on the second hard drive I can't boot from it...

I can start XP on the 2nd drive cause during installation boot.ini on the 1st drive was modified to dual boot. Whe I looked in the root folder of the 2nd drive there was no ntdetect.com, no ntldr and no boot.ini. I copied those files, ran fixmbr and fixboot from the recovery consol but when I set BIOS to boot from the 2nd drive I get the message:
"Reboot and select proper boot device..."

If I look under disk management in my computer it says that d: (my 2nd drive) is a system drive and system start.

I really don't want to keep booting my 2nd drive with help from the first one any more, any thoughts?

Best regards,

Mattias

 

[just_a_nobody]

Have you tried to disconnect the old hard drive, to see if your computer will first boot from the new drive? Is your old drive's jumper set to slave (SL)? If you can get windows, to boot up from the new drive, without the second drive active (disconnected), then maybe you can install the old drive, set to slave. You don't want to worry about the old drive, until you are sure the new drive can do its thing.

 

[mattiasj]

Problem solved

I managed to solve the problem with a little help from a friend. When I installed the second XP version the system was set up for dual boot on my first harddrive c:. When I used disk management to look at my drives it said that d: was a system partition but apparantly it wasn't set to beeing active. That's why the computer didn't boot from it. After I had set it as active I copied ntldr, ntdetect.com and bootfon.bin to it. After i did this the computer booted from d: but since the bios changed the enumeration of the discs it started my old XP installation from the new drive so I had to change the boot.ini.

/Mattias