HD Removal

Paul Delaney · Apr 4, 2005

Hi all

Hope someone here can help me. I have an old 7GB hard drive as my
Primary Master with Windows 98 (C

installed upon it and have recently
added a 160GB drive as a slave. On this drive I have two partitions,
one with Windows XP Pro (E

installed and a smaller on to mess around
with Linux etc (D

.

I am now wanting to move the smaller drive to another PC however when I
do take it out (or disable it within BIOS) the XP drive fails to boot
giving me "Disk Boot Failure".

I assume this is because I installed it with the C: drive already in
there and this is where the boot instructions were placed and upon
removing then it fails.

My question is how do I go about booting the drive, I have tried a few
things I picked up elsewhere (copying across all the root files in C: to
E: etc) to no avail. Can anyone tell me what I need to do please?

Many thanks

Paul

PS Let me know if you need additional details.

george · Apr 5, 2005

Paul Delaney said:
Hi all

Hope someone here can help me. I have an old 7GB hard drive as my
Primary Master with Windows 98 (C installed upon it and have recently
added a 160GB drive as a slave. On this drive I have two partitions,
one with Windows XP Pro (E installed and a smaller on to mess around
with Linux etc (D.

I am now wanting to move the smaller drive to another PC however when I
do take it out (or disable it within BIOS) the XP drive fails to boot
giving me "Disk Boot Failure".

I assume this is because I installed it with the C: drive already in
there and this is where the boot instructions were placed and upon
removing then it fails.

My question is how do I go about booting the drive, I have tried a few
things I picked up elsewhere (copying across all the root files in C: to
E: etc) to no avail. Can anyone tell me what I need to do please?

Many thanks

Paul

PS Let me know if you need additional details.

Paul,

Your are facing the problem that your XP installation has gone onto drive
E:.
Not that that would not work, because as you know it does, but now all your
references in the installed system, as far as driveletters are concerned
(like in shortcuts, but most importantly the registry) are based on the
setup you had during install, so C: (something)+boot files for XP, D:
(Linux) and E: (XP).
If you remove C: from the list, the other driveletters will change, so all
of a sudden your XP installation finds itself on D: and all the references
are out of whack, so it won't really work.
Removing the smaller drive means you have to shuffle the partitions on your
bigger drive in such a way (possibly with Partition Magic) that it contains
a small C: Primary partition in front, set to be the active partition so it
can contain the XP boot files. To be safe I'd make it some 4 GB.
Doing that will at least keep your driveletter assignments (and thus
references to it) in place.
Then boot your system from the XP CD and Repair the installation using the
Recovery Console.
When eventually booted to the prompt run the commands FIXMBR, FIXBOOT and
BOOTCFG.
That should do it.

hth

george

Walter Clayton · Apr 5, 2005

Go here http://www.bootitng.com/utilities.html and download partinfo. It
doesn't really which OS you download it into other than the command line
required.
If you download it into 98, unzip the entire contents into a known directory
(nothing in the temp structure). Open a command prompt and navigate to the
directory where you unzipped partinfo and run the following commands:
partinfo >partinfo.txt
start notepad partinfo.txt

If running in XP, follow the above with the exception that the commands are
as follows:

partinfw >partinfo.txt ( Yes that is partinfW not O)
start notepad partinfo.txt

In either instance, copy and paste the contents of partinfo.txt back here.

Paul Delaney · Apr 5, 2005

Go here http://www.bootitng.com/utilities.html and download partinfo.
If running in XP, follow the above with the exception that the
commands are as follows:

partinfw >partinfo.txt ( Yes that is partinfW not O)
start notepad partinfo.txt

In either instance, copy and paste the contents of partinfo.txt back
here.

Hi Walter, info requested below:

Run date: 04/05/2005 18:46

====================================================================
MBR Partition Information (HD0):
+====+====+=============+====+=============+===========+===========+
| 0: | 80 | 0 1 1 | c | 1023 254 63 | 63 | 16498692 |
| 1: | 0 | 0 0 0 | 0 | 0 0 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2: | 0 | 0 0 0 | 0 | 0 0 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 3: | 0 | 0 0 0 | 0 | 0 0 0 | 0 | 0 |
+====+====+=============+====+=============+===========+===========+
BOOT SECTOR INFORMATION
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
File System ID: 0xC LBA: 63 Total Sectors: 16498692 ID: 0x1
Jump: EB 58 90 (EB 58 90)
OEM Name: MSWIN4.1 (MSWIN4.1)
Bytes Per Sec: 512 (512)
Sec Per Clust: 8 (8)
Res Sectors: 32 (32)
Num FATs: 2 (2)
Root Dir Ents: 0 (0)
Sectors: 0 (0)
Media: 0xF8 (0xF8)
Secs Per FAT: 0 (0)
Sec Per Track: 63 (63)
Heads: 255 (255)
Hidden Secs: 63 (63)
Huge Sectors: 16498692 (16498692)
Huge Secs Per FAT: 16097 (16097)
Flags: 0x0 (0x0)
Version: 0 (0)
Root Dir Clust: 2 (2)
FS Info Sec: 1 (1)
FS Bkup Sec: 6 (6)
Reserved: 0 0 0 0 0 0
Drive Num: 0x80 (0x80)
Res: 0x0 (0x0)
Boot Sig: 0x29 (0x29)
Vol ID: 0x33570809 (0x33570809)
Volume Label: NO NAME (NO NAME )
FS Type: FAT32 (FAT32 )
Boot Flag: 0xAA55 (0xAA55)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
====================================================================
MBR Partition Information (HD1):
+====+====+=============+====+=============+===========+===========+
| 0: | 0 | 0 1 1 | 7 | 1023 254 63 | 63 | 40965687 |
| 1: | 0 | 1023 0 1 | f | 1023 254 63 | 40965750 | 193454730 |
+====+====+=============+====+=============+===========+===========+
Volume Information
+----+----+-------------+----+-------------+-----------+-----------+
| 0: | 0 | 1023 1 1 | 7 | 1023 254 63 | 63 | 193454667 |
| 1: | 0 | 0 0 0 | 0 | 0 0 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2: | 0 | 0 0 0 | 0 | 0 0 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 3: | 0 | 0 0 0 | 0 | 0 0 0 | 0 | 0 |
MBR Partition Information (HD1) Continued:
+====+====+=============+====+=============+===========+===========+
| 2: | 0 | 0 0 0 | 0 | 0 0 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 3: | 0 | 0 0 0 | 0 | 0 0 0 | 0 | 0 |
+====+====+=============+====+=============+===========+===========+
BOOT SECTOR INFORMATION
------------------------------------------------------------------------
File System ID: 0x7 LBA: 63 Total Sectors: 40965687 ID: 0x1
Jump: EB 52 90
OEM Name: NTFS
Bytes Per Sec: 512
Sec Per Clust: 8
Res Sectors: 0
Zero 1: 0x0
Zero 2: 0x0
NA 1: 0x0
Media: 0xF8
Zero 3: 0x0
Sec Per Track: 63
Heads: 255
Hidden Secs: 63
NA 2: 0x0
NA 3: 0x800080
Total Sectors: 0x02711636
MFT LCN: 0x0C0000
MFT Mirr LCN: 0x0271163
Clust Per FRS: 0xF6
Clust Per IBlock: 0x1
Volume SN: 0x408439B38439AC72
Checksum: 0x0
Boot Flag: 0xAA55
------------------------------------------------------------------------
File System ID: 0x7 LBA: 40965813 Total Sectors: 193454667
Jump: EB 52 90
OEM Name: NTFS
Bytes Per Sec: 512
Sec Per Clust: 8
Res Sectors: 0
Zero 1: 0x0
Zero 2: 0x0
NA 1: 0x0
Media: 0xF8
Zero 3: 0x0
Sec Per Track: 63
Heads: 255
Hidden Secs: 63
NA 2: 0x0
NA 3: 0x800080
Total Sectors: 0x0B87E24A
MFT LCN: 0x0C0000
MFT Mirr LCN: 0x0B87E24
Clust Per FRS: 0xF6
Clust Per IBlock: 0x1
Volume SN: 0x244066784066511A
Checksum: 0x0
Boot Flag: 0xAA55

Andy · Apr 6, 2005

Temporarily connect a drive as slave to the 160GB drive, and install
XP to the slave drive. This will install the boot files to the 160GB
drive and enable booting. Edit the boot.ini file on the 160GB drive,
changing rdisk(1) to rdisk(0). Remove the slave drive.

george · Apr 6, 2005

bad idea

inline...

Andy said:
Temporarily connect a drive as slave to the 160GB drive, and install
XP to the slave drive. This will install the boot files to the 160GB
drive and enable booting. Edit the boot.ini file on the 160GB drive,
changing rdisk(1) to rdisk(0). Remove the slave drive.

....and end up with correct boot files and a good boot.ini, but with
incorrect drive-letter references in the OS installed on the 160GB drive.
old situation:
disk0
C: boot files for XP + 98
disk1
D: Linux
E: XP.
new situation after removal
disk0
C: boot files for XP + Linux
D: XP

george

Walter Clayton · Apr 7, 2005

OK. The end results will be non-standard, but they'll work in so far as XP
is concerned. However do start->run->c:\boot.ini and copy and paste the
contents back here.

Boot.ini will need to be modified and copied to the root of the primary on
the second drive as well as the boot strap code.

I've zero experience with *ix so getting it back in the loop is something I
can't help with. Once you've got XP running the easiest thing may be to
reinstall *ix unless you have a heavy investment in it already.

What I don't see is where you have *ix installed since you have one fat
partition in HD0 and two NTFS partitions on HD1.

Andy · Apr 7, 2005

Not true. I've actually done this, so I know that it works. You end up
with D: as the system partition, and E: as the boot partition.

Andrew Murray · Apr 25, 2005

move the other disk to the primary master channel. it needs to be there to
work as a boot/system disk.

HD Removal

Paul Delaney

george

Walter Clayton

Paul Delaney

Andy

george

Walter Clayton

Andy

Andrew Murray