Dual Boot question.

C

Cordoba

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Hi all,

I have a machine that, once the BIOS had finished it would give me a choice of booting from either of the two SATA drives that are on the machine (both Win XP Pro o/s's). The C drive had a problem, I had to format and reload Win XP on to it. Now the system will only boot from that drive, although the BIOS does see the other drive but not it's o/s. Any thoughts?

Regs
C.
 
I stand to be corrected, but your issue is that the drive that held the MBR has been reformatted, said so you would have to install XP again on the second drive in order for it to work if that makes sense.
 
Yep, installing XP on the primary drive has re-written the mbr (master boot record) as if it's the only OS.

You need to reinstall XP on the second disk and it should rewrite the mbr automatically to give you the choice between the two OS's at start.

At least it will be easy to back up any files from the second disk.

The opening sequence when you start your computer, btw, doesn't really involve the BIOS, it's known as POST which stands for Power On Self Test where the computer checks to make sure all the bits and pieces are there and all is good to boot into the OS.

And welcome to the forum :)
 
Not entirely. If you have Windows OS boot drives, the modification is easy. You can go to system properties, advanced tab. Click the startup and recovery button. This will present you with the option to edit the boot.ini. This will open notepad.

You should see a line like this:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional"

Those numbers indicate the location of the boot installation for the OS desired to start. Linux boot is different, so if you have linux, this probably won't work so well. I'm not a Linux guru by any means, so google it if so.

All you have to do is copy and paste that line directly below it (be sure to modify the description in quotes so you can keep them identified properly) and increase the disk(0) to disk(1). This should allow the option to boot the secondary drive.

If you open computer management (start, right click computer, click properties. or start, control panel, administrative tools, computer management), locate disk management. This will outline the disk numbers of the system. Input that disk number into the boot.ini for disk(x), where "x" is that number.

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic9331.html has a bit more information on the situation. It talks about SCSI drives, but still applies.

voila!
 
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Silverhazesurfer said:
Not entirely. If you have Windows OS boot drives, the modification is easy. You can go to system properties, advanced tab. Click the startup and recovery button. This will present you with the option to edit the boot.ini. This will open notepad.

You should see a line like this:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional"

Those numbers indicate the location of the boot installation for the OS desired to start. Linux boot is different, so if you have linux, this probably won't work so well. I'm not a Linux guru by any means, so google it if so.

All you have to do is copy and paste that line directly below it (be sure to modify the description in quotes so you can keep them identified properly) and increase the disk(0) to disk(1). This should allow the option to boot the secondary drive.

If you open computer management (start, right click computer, click properties. or start, control panel, administrative tools, computer management), locate disk management. This will outline the disk numbers of the system. Input that disk number into the boot.ini for disk(x), where "x" is that number.

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic9331.html has a bit more information on the situation. It talks about SCSI drives, but still applies.

viola!
Click to expand...

Excellent, I'll make a note of that :thumb:

Today I guess I learnt something :)

Btw, a 'Viola' is a musical instrument, 'Voila' is the french word for 'There ya go!' or similar ;)
 
and after 4 yrs of French class in HS, i should have known that. :o

The reinstallation of the OS will accomplish the same thing, kind of. The part when the installation asks you which drive to install Windows to will add that line to the primary disk's boot.ini. When you install to the primary disk with a secondary partition, you increase partition by 1. If you were to have more than one SATA card in the machine handling drives, then you would increase the multi by one. And so on for multiple SATA controllers, multiple partitions on multiple disks. You could make it look really interesting.
 
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