Windows XP Use win xp boot drive

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scarabian

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I have two drives in my computer both of which have Windows XP upon them. However I have just reinstalled the OS to my smaller drive. Windows sees both drives and can access both however my larger drive does not appear as a boot option which means all the time I have spent setting up and installing is gone. I cant find a way to set this drive as bootable and it just shows up in disc manager as healthy(active) I have tried diskpart and MBR command therein but to no avail . Please help me return to blissful computing!
 
scarabian said:
I have two drives in my computer both of which have Windows XP upon them. However I have just reinstalled the OS to my smaller drive. Windows sees both drives and can access both however my larger drive does not appear as a boot option which means all the time I have spent setting up and installing is gone. I cant find a way to set this drive as bootable and it just shows up in disc manager as healthy(active) I have tried diskpart and MBR command therein but to no avail . Please help me return to blissful computing!
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I'm not sure what you mean when you say that it doesn't appear as a 'Boot option', but have you not gone into the BIOS and set the required drive to primary boot device?
 
How big are your partitions ?? Isn't there something about going beyond a certain sector on the hard drive which stops booting ????????? or does that only apply to 98 etc .
 
I'd say set large drive as master... reomve smaller drve completly. Reboot and go into BIOS... see if the hadrive is an available primary boot device. If succesful at boot replace in the smaller boot drive and set as slave or master.. depending on what you are trying to do. If not to seperate OS then make small drive slave. Avoid CS cable select it tends to make a mess of things.
 
I'm not sure about that last message - I use a small primary partition and leave the rest for the second partition - this way I can maintain manually that system files and games are on the first 40gb of the HDD, whereas music and pictures and documents are on the later half. Surely that makes more sense??
 
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