When a disk is formatted, it normally has the boot record put onto it (even if
it is not the first disk). What is normally not done is marking the partition
as active, unless it is the first disk (and usually the first partition on
that disk, since only one partition on a disk can/should be marked as active).
In DOS, the FDISK program had a /MBR switch which would write a new boot
record to a disk. In fdisk, you could select a partition to mark as active
(but only on the first disk).
If you can boot to DOS or Win98/ME, there is a free program you can download
called AEFDISK that will allow you to write boot records, mark partitions, and
all of that.
Norton Ghost comes with GDISK (DOS) and GDISK32 (Win) that also can do these
things - the Win version has limitations, since it cannot change some things
while running under Windows.
If your boot record is special in some way and really needs to be copied from
one disk to another (not just created fresh on the second disk), you will need
some other tool. There are some hex editors that can do this kind of thing,
and something like rawrite may be able to (but I think that it is just for
floppies).
Are you going to remove your current boot disk? If not, your BIOS may not
support booting from anything but the first disk. What you may be able to do
in this case is just edit boot.ini on your current boot disk to add a choice
to load a different OS from the other disk.
|Does anyone know the procedure for moving the boot sector from one physical
|drive to another? I wish to boot from another physical hard disk.
|
|I'm running win 2000 pro with SP4..
|
|thks
|
|
