What can I do?

[PRAETOR02]

I recently installed win xp on a new hard drive....while having the old drive pluged in.The os on the old system was Xp too.Now....the not so fun part is this....I formatted the old one...hoping to be able to make my new one a master and he old one a slave.It doesn't work.Alone...the new hard drive...works...win xp works...everything is just as it should be.If a make it a "master where slave present" and make the old one a slave....I get the ntdrl error msg.The old one is still disk 0...and the new one is disk 1....in bios.It gets even crazier.....if I make the old one a master and the new one a slave....then I can initialize win xp and i can see the old hard drive....Can anyone tell me how to change disk 0 to disk 1 ?

 

[Rik]

The drives are ata's i expect and you are using an ata data cable? If so just swap the 2 drives over on your cable and that should cure the problem. Explain- with ata cables, the drive on the end of the cable is master and the other is slave.

Hope that helps. Rik.

 

[RealBlackStuff]

You can't unless you can edit bootsectors etc. Your ntldr etc. files are in the root of the first harddisk (your old drive 0), as is the MBR.

You need to reinstall XP with the new HD as Master and as the only HD.
Then add the old drive as slave, and copy your personal data over. Then format the old one for your purposes.

 

[Rik]

Sorry, forgot about the boot sector. Should be able to sys from one drive to the other tho?

 

[Spike]

The MBR can be fixed from the recovery console. (command is fixmbr)

I'm not entirely sure, but I thought the recovery console could also write a new boot sector to the disk? I may well be wrong, but I thought it worth asking.

 

[patio]

Yes you can do this from the recovery console...the command is the same, fixmbr.

patio.