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XP System hates me :-(

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by fireboss

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I have a Dell 8400 that I've upgraded and modified over the years. It has XP home on C (drive 0), XP Pro on drive E (drive 2) and a data drive D (drive 1). These are all sata drives. I started out today to remove C to put into another machine and let the system boot from E. MY brain and my research let me down as I couldn't find a way to do that. After futilely fighting it I decided to just move the data from D to the NAS and remove it. The data moved fine but the system refuses to boot without drive D in place. It gives me a boot drive not found error no matter how I take it out. I know I'm missing something here and I'll probably buy a drive so I can get the media machine up but I need to know ho to get the rest done or I'll go crazy . . . .Bwaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahaha...:-P

24 replies

by peconet tietokoneet

Well if is one or the other it is usually configured through your BIOS (Boot) settings. You should see the drive(s) in the "Boot" section. Once found (if not found take out and then replace with good Sata cable) make sure that it is the First (top of the list) to boot. When that is done you will need your motherboard driver disk that has the "Sata" drivers on. Now when you load on Windows, look for (down at the bottom of your screen) "Load third party drivers", i think it is "F2" button on your keyboard but you will see this also, press this "F2" button and load on your Motherboard sata drive disk and search for "Raid 32" or "Raid 64" (depending on your version of Windows), click on this and it should load and then Windows should carry on loading once it has copied the code.
Hope this is of help to you.

by fireboss

I've read this a couple of times and am not sure what you mean. The system is a desktop. The system boots fine as long as all three drives are in place. Remove. either physically or by turning off in the BIOS, any of them - including the data drive - and the system will not boot. The error says there is no boot device present even when both boot drives are in place and only the data drive is gone. The system is not a RAID, merely 3 separate drives so RAID drivers are not an issue here. I simply need to know how to get the system to allow removal of a drive since apparently any drive failure would trash the system completely and that can't be right.

by ansugisalas

If you have tried with the boot drive back in place, but it still doesn't work then maybe the problem is something really simple?
Have you looked at all of the cables again?
Both the data jacks and the power jacks?
And have you checked that the data jacks are connected in the same way as originally?

by oh smeg

You have 3 HDD one has XP Home another has XP Pro and the last one is a Data Drive. You now want to remove the XP Home drive and fit it to another computer and the computer that it came from is no longer booting.

This is perfectly correct as after you remove the Primary Boot Device which as the Initial Files written to it's Root there are no files left to tell the system where to look for the booting files.

You can not remove the Primary Boot Drive from any System and have it boot again. You need to reinstall Windows to get the Lost files loaded again.

To do this you can try a Repair/In Place Install by following the directions here

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978788

But the reality is that it's generally just easier to perform a new clean install so that there are no hooks in the system that point to the removed HDD. ;)

Col

by fireboss

which I don't necessarily agree with but that aside for the moment, why does removing the data drive which has no boot record nor any relationship to booting the system cause a failure to boot? Removing it either by physically disconnecting it or by turning it off in the Bios results in a paragraph long message telling me the boot cannot continue.
Currently then failure or removal of ANY of the drives produces a system that will not boot. That just can;t be right. . . :-(

by ansugisalas

Is magic. Don't mess with C.
D and E can go smeg themselves, but C you gotta keep.
Seriously though, my system regularly messes up because it's somehow decided to allocate C to a removable. I could fix the problem, but I'm a bit too lazy to reinstall everything, especially since everything works fine otherwise.
So now my boot drive is not-C, but all programs seemingly default to C as boot drive, and not all of them have contingencies for a non-C boot drive.
And god help me if there's no disk in the removable that the letter C has been assigned to...
Eventually I had to remove the C drive letter to keep it from being assigned to an empty removable.
Now I have no drive C, and I know how Adam and Eve felt when they saw the land of their exile.

by oh smeg

Set by the Hardware that gets the primary Files written to it.

Once that drive whichever one it is gets removed there is no possibility of the system booting. The files that I'm talking about are generally [b]Invisible[/b] to a Running Windows System you need to use a Boot Disc to start the system and then look at the root of all the drives till you find the offending files. ;)

Col

by cg it

that his computer should boot to that second drive with XP Pro on it when he removes the drive with XP Home on it.

what the guy doesn't get is that the boot.ini file has which drive is which.

Sample Boot.ini file

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home" /fastdetect

His XP Pro isn't on disc(0)risk(0) partition(1), XP Home is.

Also the NTLDR [boot loader] is most likely missing from the drive that has XP Pro on it.

What he has to do is repair/replace/modify the boot.ini file and install the NTLDR boot loader on the drive that has XP Pro.

that is, even if, in the bios, he uses the second drive as the boot drive in the order that the BIOS looks for a bootable drive.

but then XP Pro probably does hate him because XP Home is installed on the C: drive instead of him.

That old rivary between Pro and Home goes way back....

by ron k.

When you reinstall whatever system you decide to put on there you should still be able to see that data. If there are programs on there, don't expect them to work because for all intents and purposes they haven't been installed according to the new OS.
Operating systems aren't sentient They are incapable of emotion.

by santeewelding

You gots to put it like a fundamental, mathematical one-to-one correspondence.

Comes out sounding like Sanskrit.

by nickgreene

What about removing the xp home drive, booting into recovery console on an xp pro disc, and using a "fixboot" command on the xp pro drive.

by fireboss

Reading the instructions it seems to say that I'll need to reinstall everything after I finish. Isn't the result then the same as a clean install?

by fireboss

Take any one drive out and it will not. So if any drive fails even the data drive the system can't be booted

by ansugisalas

Format, Fdisk /mbr and reinstall with only one drive on the machine. Make sure the hardware settings are ok too.

I don't see a reason why all three machines would need to be in there, unless OS'es are somehow installed a little bit on all drives.
Anyway, a wipe and reinstall should fix it, so what are you waiting for?

by fireboss

and I have to leave the boot drives in place why does removing the data drive cause a boot failure? The data drive has no relationship to the boot drives. I should be able to take it out and still boot but I can't

by ron k.

You have program Flubberdub on what is functioning as the C: drive but the data from Flubberdub is stored on the data drive. Where do all of the registry keys for Flubberdub point? The fact that it's NOT working shows that your plan has some holes in it.
If your intent is to install programs on a data drive, move that drive to another computer and then use those programs it won't work.

by fireboss

Nothing installed there and everything that was stored there - pictures, word processing files etc - was moved to the NAS long ago

by oh smeg

What is the hardware assigned Primary Boot Device here?

Doesn't matter what you think you assigned here but what did the Hardware assign before you even got to touch the keyboard?

Also which SATA Ports are these Drives connected to. They are numbered on the M'Board for a reason. ;)

Col

by peconet tietokoneet

I remember having this with XP years ago and found that they shared the swap file. What you need to do is do a back up of ALL data and just start off with just one hdd then load on your Windows operating system. Why have two XP systems on there anyway? Just have the one operating system and use the others as data backup drives.

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