XP Boots off of secondary drive?

[Rick2884]

Hi,
I am new to this forum and looking for some support. I have a Dell XPS desktop with XP Pro SP3. I have two identical SATA drives. I use the second one for back-up. I created a duplicate image of SATA0 (My C: Drive) using Acronis True Image Home. When I completed the process and rebooted, the computer boots off of the new F: drive rather than the old C: drive.

Perhaps I could live with this, but windows needs both drives to boot.

It boots fine off of either drive, but the other has to be installed. If I remove one of the drives, the XP load just hangs.

In disk manager: Sata0 (C) is listed as Healthy (Pagefile) while SATA1 (F) is listed as Healthy (System)

In the setup BIOS I can specify Boot Sequence but this only lists Onboard SATA Hard Drive, but does not specify which one.

Any suggestions? I would like the computer to boot from the original C drive so that I can use the new F drive as a backup.

Thanks!

 

[kimsland]

Hi,
I am new to this forum and looking for some support. I have a Dell XPS desktop with XP Pro SP3. I have two identical SATA drives. I use the second one for back-up. I created a duplicate image of SATA0 (My C: Drive) using Acronis True Image Home. When I completed the process and rebooted, the computer boots off of the new F: drive rather than the old C: drive.

I don't understand
You created a duplicate image, and then you left the drive in there?
Imaging is not backing up data exactly. It is there to make another copy of your entire drive
But since you left it in, I'm sure Windows then got all messed up wondering whats happened to all the old paths C Drive etc

Now, it is not a perfect image anymore, anyway

Exactly what do you want to "backup"? Because this will change what is suggested to do
Presently you need to to run bootcfg /rebuild, but I wouldn't even do that until we confirm what you want backed up, and then to make the system drive C drive again (only)

 

[Rick2884]

Thanks for the reply.

I have used the duplicate hard drive as a back-up procedure for years, and not had any problems. Not only am I backing up data, but the whole system... This way if the OS gets corrupted, or if anything else weird happens, I simply swap out the current C: drive and replace with the back-up.

I found this to be preferable to messing with repairing windows, or otherwise trying to trouble-shoot what went wrong.

Anyway, I have left the imaged drive installed in the past without any problem. What I am unsure of is why windows got confused this time. ... and what I can do to about it.

Anyway, Bootcfg/rebuild looks like a good option. I will try that once I locate an XP Recovery CD

 

[LookinAround]

Maybe I'm not following things correctly (or maybe i'm misunderstanding something) but there's something very odd based on what you describe. You said

I have two identical SATA drives. I use the second one for back-up. I created a duplicate image of SATA0 (My C: Drive) using Acronis True Image Home.

But Acronis doesn't create a bootable clone image. Instead, it creates a compressed and propietary file format (.tib files) that Windows can't even read! (You need to view or recover the content of .tib files by running Acronis)

So if you're really booting off of your F drive... did you possibly at one time tell Acronis to restore an image and maybe you told Acronis to restore the image to the F drive??? (maybe Acronis changed the boot.ini as well based on the recovery instructions you told it when it restored a clone image)

 

[tipstir]

Hi,
I am new to this forum and looking for some support. I have a Dell XPS desktop with XP Pro SP3. I have two identical SATA drives. I use the second one for back-up. I created a duplicate image of SATA0 (My C: Drive) using Acronis True Image Home. When I completed the process and rebooted, the computer boots off of the new F: drive rather than the old C: drive.

Perhaps I could live with this, but windows needs both drives to boot.

It boots fine off of either drive, but the other has to be installed. If I remove one of the drives, the XP load just hangs.

In disk manager: Sata0 (C) is listed as Healthy (Pagefile) while SATA1 (F) is listed as Healthy (System)

In the setup BIOS I can specify Boot Sequence but this only lists Onboard SATA Hard Drive, but does not specify which one.

Any suggestions? I would like the computer to boot from the original C drive so that I can use the new F drive as a backup.

Thanks!

Sounds like some wires are crossed. Take the pagefile off the C and put it on SATA1. Shutdown the system and put SATA0 to SATA1 then SATA1 to SATA0