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Boot device

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by mnan2004

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I am trying to boot from my 160 gig hard drive where my xp operating system is located but I can not boot unless I have my other hard drive plugged in with 98 installed. I ran the xp setup from the 98 hard drive and installed it on the other hard drive. Is what I want to be able to do is have the xp hard drive be able to be independent of the 98 drive. Can anyone help?

6 replies

by lizzy

First thing to check is that the XP hard drive jumpers are set to Master and not Slave drive--you will have to look at the specifications of the hard drive to see where that should be. Some are printed in small print on the hard drive.

Check your BIOS and make sure that it is set to auto-detect the drive.

HTH

by sgt_shultz

see if you don't have the boot loader accidently installed on your win98 drive. (where is hidden, system, read-only file: boot.ini located? if not on your new drive, this is the problem, at least one of them)you may have to reinstall xp without booting from that drive. you could try boot magic or other 3rd party to establish correct boot.ini and other stuff for booting off new drive.

by lizzy

I'm guessing that you rejected my answer because you checked the jumpers on the HD and the BIOS settings since you didn't post a comment.

You can install the 160GB drive as the only drive and re-install XP directly to that drive to make sure that there are no boot programs loaded. Use Fdisk and format like you would normally. You will need a boot diskette with CD drivers to begin. If no boot diskette, boot to CD directly via system BIOS (F12 on Dell for boot device menu, F10 for Compaq). Speaking of Compaq's, they have a separate partition on their hard drive that controls the boot partition and you need to create that on the XP drive with your recovery diskettes\CD if Compaq.

Perhaps a little more info on what system you have and how it was originally set up--OS, hardware, etc. would help to resolve your issue.

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