Computer boots to slave HDD unless Windows XP CD is in drive - TechRepublic
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March 15, 2007 at 04:26 AM
daniel_braykovich

Computer boots to slave HDD unless Windows XP CD is in drive

by daniel_braykovich . Updated 18 years, 1 month ago

This computer has two hard drives, a 40GB primary drive and a 120GB slave drive. The main user of this computer installed the main version of Windows onto the slave drive, and left a somewhat corrupted version of Windows on the primary drive. When the computer booted up, there would be a boot menu with two choices (both Windows). The first choice would give a mid-install Windows setup and the second choice would load up Windows properly.

I decided to format and install Windows on the primary hard drive, and format the slave hard drive and leave that blank for music, movies, etc. Problem is that everytime the computer boots up, some text comes up saying that NTLDR is missing (ie. it’s trying to boot into the slave drive). However if you leave the Windows XP CD in one of the optical drives and don’t boot into the CD, it loads up Windows correctly. I tried putting the NTLDR-related files on the slave hard drive, and sure enough it comes up text saying that other different files are missing.

How do I get it to always boot into the primary hard drive and stop trying to boot into the secondary hard drive?

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