Tricky one and kind of Long but really need help!

[Gomer]

Here's the scoop. MotherBoard Bios Chip got Erased. Replaced with new Motherboard: Gigabyte: GA-8IPE1000-G Rev. 4


Have 2 Hard Drives C: and D:....C: was the main drive.

After startup the computer asked if we wanted to start in Safe mode but would give us an error and not load. This was because it was trying to install drivers for the old Motherboard. I bought the computer from Alienware and it only came with a recovery disk so I could not use the windows repair option. My friend put in the recovery disk expecting to get some kind of an option but instead it just automatically loaded windows on my D Drive. So Now I have 2 Operating systems one on C Drive which I can't get to as it will not boot and one on D. We told the Bios to use D when Booting and we were able to boot into safe mode using the OS on D and load the motherboard drivers. I decided ok I will just make the C: Drive a Storage Drive since we are now booting to/from D anyways, but windows would not let me reformat C even wile using the disk manager, so I decided to take the drive out. Well when I did that the Bios could not see my D drive and said nothing was there. It saw my CD and DVD drives but not the D Drive. Pluged C-drive back in and bingo they both show up?? Then I tried to configure D Drive to Master with slave and C Drive to Slave. Computer attempted to Boot, but took a really long time and then said OS not found. Put everything back to the way it was "C: Master with Slave and D: Slave", restarted and both drives showed up in bios and it would boot normally to windows. Would like to know 2 things:

1: Why does it still want C: to be Hooked up Eventhough we are now Booting From D:

&

2: If now Booting from D: Why Can't I Format my Old C: drive and erase everything on it?

Would Just like to have the D Drive as the Main Drive as it is now and want to reformat my C: Drive to use as an extra drive, but now am afraid to do so as I'm worried computer will not boot if C is erased. Any help and Suggestions would be Great!! Sorry this was so long!

 

[SOcRatEs]

Hello! Welcome to TechSpot!

Sounds like a jumper thing on the hdd's.
Is there a reason why they need to be on same ide cable?
Pull both hdd's, decide which is to be primary C: set jumpers to single or master, install windows to this drive without installing second drive. Once Alienwindows is fin, shut down and install second hdd. Be certain on the jumpers, (cable select etc.) I always put my C: on the end of cable & the slave in the middle. Some will argue this but it has worked for me when I had similar prob to this.

G'Luck

 

[Gomer]

Thanks I actually figured it out. Took out C Drive and set the D to "cable select" and put it first on the cable. Then when rebooting got a NTDLR Missing error and downloaded a program called FixNTLDR. Used this to boot to windows and found out that the D drive did not have a boot.ini file. Used that FixNTLDR program to paste 3 files from the floppy it makes for you onto the D Drive one of which was a boot.ini file. Made the 3 files hidden so they would not be deleted and was able to boot to the desktop with no more problems. Also (after getting D Drive set up by itself in the machine) was then able to replace the C Drive also setting that to cable select and putting it in the middle of the ribbon cable then used the western digital Life guard data tools that came with one of my hard drive to reformat and erase the old C drive. The only problem now is my D Drive is the Primary and my C drive is now for storage. Would like to change the D to C and the C to D without having to re-install again. A friend said Partition Magic might be able to do this, so I'm looking into that, but for now I'm up and running although it feels wierd to have my D drive as the main drive. Thanks for your reply and if you have any more suggestions please let me know! :wave:

 

[SOcRatEs]

Very nice!
Acronis true image is the best I've used to date.