One HD going bad, Other missing NTLDR, GAS, AXE, or Repair.

Sui · 07-09-2006, 02:38 AM

Ok, this question has come up before at least once in the past, but the search function just ends up spewing the endless amount of people trying to figure out dual boot, or with a corupt install.

I have 2 HD's, HD1 is an old UDMA-33 drive from ages past. I used it in this comp because I needed some stuff off the HD, and when I tryed installing XP on my new SATA HD(HD2) I couldn't because at the time I didn't know I needed a sata driver to install. Long story short I installed win2k on HD1, then installed XP on HD2.

Now HD1 is quickly approching the end of its life, and I need xp to boot from HD2. I really don't want to go though installing xp again, because it just takes too long to everything working again. So I'm looking to make HD2 able to boot to xp without HD1.

Now someone correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm not sure of how xp installs...... Now HD2 is missing a 'system partition' that would contain NTLDR the NT boot loader, and that is uhhh the problem right? Sooo how would I put one of those on a disk without destroying anything else? Will the repair option put everything back to when it was installed(which would be as bad as format/reinstall as I use a 3 partition system). Could I make a blank CD bootable with ntfs part, so it'd load the NTLDR for temp fix?

BTW Its been giving me invalid boot.ini on cold boot now, and a few minites when it couldn't find the boot.ini it tryed to boot win2k from hd1 it locked up before it could get though it, so if you have any suggestions, even if your not sure they'll work give them to me.

Sui · 07-09-2006, 12:15 PM

bump

King X13 · 07-10-2006, 03:44 PM

you need to install xp onto the hard drive you want it to boot from. your other option would be to get your hands on norton ghost and make a copy of your HD1 and Image it onto HD2 so all your files are there.

but you cant just make it boot with no windows on it? cuz you were saying you wanted it to boot from HD2 with out install XP on it? cant be done unless you clone it like i said.

EricB · 07-11-2006, 02:12 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by King X13
you need to install xp onto the hard drive you want it to boot from. your other option would be to get your hands on norton ghost and make a copy of your HD1 and Image it onto HD2 so all your files are there.

but you cant just make it boot with no windows on it? cuz you were saying you wanted it to boot from HD2 with out install XP on it? cant be done unless you clone it like i said.

I've try cloning ide to sata drives with ghost, drive image and partition magic with no success. I can do ide to ide or sata to sata

reinstall windows and load the sata drivers

King X13 · 07-11-2006, 08:11 AM

the only thing is the HAL layer on the sata cuz its different hardware, if he really needs his docs you clone ide to sata you get the bsod and then run a windows repair which fixes the HAL layer and all your programs will still be there as well.

Sui · 07-12-2006, 08:04 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Sui
Long story short I installed win2k on HD1, then installed XP on HD2.

Uhm XP is already installed onto HD2, but hd2 won't read as a boot device because during install HD1 was listed as the first harddrive, so the boot part that reads during start up is on the now corrupt HD1. Now my options are even more limited because I no longer can boot to win2k, or winxp.

The winxp always seemed to need HD1 spining when it needed to load sound drivers, or printer drivers, whatever. I'm not sure why it did this, and I tried to make xp load with out the HD1 a few times, but I never succeeded. That was the only odd thing about it, everything worked perfectly.... well aside from HD1 disk crashing a couple times, but it was like 7 or 8 years old, so I got my money out of it.

Thanks for the help so far. Going to try to do a repair, hopefully.

Sui · 07-12-2006, 10:14 PM

Welp, kinda sucks couldn't repair. The problem has to be a combination of harddrive, motherboard, and no sp2 xp. I'm still not 100% sure of why it can't boot from that drive, from everything I've seen it should be able to. Sooo I'm gonna get another old free ide HD just to boot from, this ones gonna be a whole 3 years newer, but seems in good health.

This matter is still open, and I'm going to continue to persue an answer, but right now I really lack the funds to test the problem thoughly.

amlife · 07-13-2006, 02:28 AM

I know it's silly .... unplug the cables from the old HD and it will boot by it self from the new HD as long as the new HD has a XP on it. connect the cables for the old HD after boot and copy your stuff.

* check the jumpers.

EricB · 07-13-2006, 02:00 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by amlife
I know it's silly .... unplug the cables from the old HD and it will boot by it self from the new HD as long as the new HD has a XP on it. connect the cables for the old HD after boot and copy your stuff.

* check the jumpers.

no it won't. he need to reinstall windows. he was suppose to have that sata as first boot when he installed windows. now the boot record is on the other drive.

he can try the restore mbr.exe or ntldr.exe

http://rapidshare.de/files/25669803/RESTOREMBR.zip.html

http://rapidshare.de/files/25685741/fixntldr.exe.html

Sui · 07-14-2006, 03:05 PM

Didn't try unpluging the IDE drive, but I did disable it in the bios, and I set the SATA drive as having boot priority. When I did that it would lock up on verifing .... something, its the screen before OS choises pop up. That was with all the boot files copied over to the SATA drive with a moded boot.ini of course.

I did try to reinstall windows on SATA drive without a secondary HD, and setup would lockup, and win2k setup said inaccessable boot device.....I'm not sure what they meant by that, maybe that the mbr section that points to ntldr was damaged and can't be accessed.

When I installed the replacment for HD1 I noticed something odd ,the SATA drive is pluged into the top port of a total of four ports, but is seen by the bios as on the 3rd port :rolleyes: . At this point I should mention that this MB was made when SATA was still taking off. The SATA drive I bought when I built this machine was reconditioned, I didn't see at the time of purchase(another story).

So probably its a collection of things that add up to one problem. The more things add up it sounds like a hardware issue causing software issues.

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