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Won't boot to 2nd HDD

By scottshell ·
Synopsis:
I have two disks, both have XP Pro. Both installations work fine, but only one of the disks will boot. I have to boot to one disk in order to choose the other disk (from the boot menu).


Information:
Disk1
80GB EIDE
XP Pro NTFS
Healthy (System)

Disk2
200GB SATA
XP Pro NTFS
Healthy (Boot)


What I did:
I'm trying to migrate to Disk2 so I can do away with Disk1. From Disk1, I wiped Disk2 clean with a reformat and then created 2 partitions on it. I put a lot of files into the 1st partition of Disk2, then sometime later I installed XP onto the 2nd partition. There were no issues at all with this installation.


What is happening:
I can't boot from Disk2, but when I boot from Disk1 I am able to select the XP installation on Disk2. This way I can get into Disk1's XP as well as Disk2's XP. Since I want to do away with Disk1, this is a problem. Do I have to start all over (reformat Disk2 and create a new partition) and install XP into this new 1st partition of Disk2?


I hope this was clear. Thanks in advance,
Scott

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Boot Drive

by TheChas In reply to Won't boot to 2nd HDD

If I understand what you did correctly, even though you installed XP onto the SATA drive, the IDE drive is still your boot drive.

Remove the IDE drive.

Set the SATA as the boot drive.

Boot from the XP CD.

Follow the prompts for a normal installation onto the SATA drive.

When asked if you want to install or repair, choose repair.

The installer should then add the boot files onto the SATA drive.

As a side note, for some motherboards, the onboard SATA is set up as a RAID controller. Even if you only use 1 disk, you may need to set it up as a RAID disk in order for the BIOS to allow you to boot from it.

Chas

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