Unwanted Boot DRIVE!!!!

[ericpet]

Hello friends-

On my parents 5 year old dell I recently did a fresh install of XP Home. Everything went fine and all is well with the system.

However, I had a 40gb drive installed previously that I would now like to remove. In computer management if lists the "status" of the dive as "boot". This is strange to me as the drive has no files on it that I can see (yes, showing hidden files).

Formating of the drive fails right at the end of the process.

Can I somehow mark to drive as not "boot"? When I simply unplug the power to the drive I get "system failure, boot halted", plug it back in and all is fine.

If at all possible I really do not want to start all over again. The restore disks put me back pre SP2, so the whole process take a while.

TIA for any and all help!
Eric

 

[Ididmyc600]

Hi ericpet and welcome to the TechSpot Forum :wave:

The Bootsector for the system is on the 40Gb drive thats why it fails to boot when it is removed, You would need to boot from an XP disk and go into the recovery console, from here you would run 2 commands

fixboot
fixmbr

You only have restore disks and not a full version of XP, so either live with having to do a full reinstall or get hold of an XP disk


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[ericpet]

Thanks for the advice, Ididmyc600.

However...

I have run the recovery console, both with and without first removing the troublesome drive.

FIXBOOT and FIXMBR have not changed the behavior. I still get "system failure, boot halted".

In the absence of any other guidance, I will end up starting over from the beginning.

Just so frustrating!!!! All I want to do is remove a 40gb drive that has no files on it.