problem removing second hd

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Guest

I am having a problem removing the second hard drive I installed to try
another os. I have the other os off the hd which is reformated into 2
partitions. I have tried the safely remove hardware wizard but it does not
see this other hd. When I tried unhooking the hd and restarting I get a
failure to boot message telling me to insert my recovery disk. Every time I
do this it just wants to reinstall XP. This I do not want to do because its
recovery never saves the backup and I lose everything everytime. I need to
remove the hd to install it in another computer asap. I think my master drive
is missing a boot file but I cant find it and dont want to have to reformat
and reinstall. Note: my lovely computer only came with a recovery disk, not
an actual copy of win xp. How do I fix this?? TIA-Chris
 
bad news..........your MBR on the boot disk was changed by whatever OS you
installed as a dual boot on the other drive...wanna give us some hints??
If you had a retail XP you would just enter the recovery console and type in
"fixboot" but...again bad news your "recovery" XP CD wont do that...so its
reinstall time.
peter
 
Remove the primary hd and install as a slave on another sys, or via an
external caddy, to recover any data.
Then put back and start from scratch with your recovery cd
 
I put Ubuntu on the second hd. A freind brought over their copy of XP pro so
we could try the "fixmbr" but that still was not enough. right now I
"tricked" my puter by just swapping the second hd with another smaller one
but really this is only a temp. fix as I will not always get lucky like that
and want to know how to actually fix it. I wonder if I made a mistake when I
installed the second hd. I just plugged it in and booted up and windows took
it just fine.
 
So what your saying is that the system boots with a blank 2nd HD installed
but not with no 2nd HD installed???
Have you ever changed the boot order in the BIOS??
peter
 
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