Okay this is how it goes, im running winXP Home, 1gig 266 speed ram, 3.2 p4, Radeon 9600xt, one 40gig samsung HDD, and one 8 gig maxtor HDD.
My 40gig is the master, the 8 the slave. I have a new barbone system sitting here without a hard drive. I want to pull the old 8gig out and slap it into the barebone system so i can have 2 happy comps instead of one *yay*.
The 8 gig has a working XP pro installed on it and the 40 has working Xp Home on it. When I normally start up right before windows boots i get to pick what OS i want, Home or Pro. Normally I start up Home as it has everthing on it. Then i get a black screen for 3 mins, then windows starts and all is well. Now the strange thing is that when i pull that 8gig out, my comp cant find a boot at all. I look in CMOS and it finds the 40gig just fine, but it wont boot windows from it!! ??: As soon as i put the 8gig back in, all is well again.

Plz help,
Luigi - here have a banana for good mesure w00t!

Do you need to change the jumpers on the 40G drive to indicate it's on its own? Can you boot from a floppy & see the contents of the drive? What error messages do you get?
GF

I pulled out 8gig and switched jumpers and nothign worked. If i can get my hands on a winXP disc i wil try reparing or reformatting at the extreme.

thank you for trying to help me garth

Sorry I've been away. I've been thinking about this, and I'm confused. Do you get any error messages, like no bootable drive found or something?

You should try "fixmbr" from the Rescue Console, in case the 40gig doesn't have the proper boot loader. Then try "fixboot". You can then try "bootcfg", which scans your drive for windows installs, and adds them to boot.ini.

I'm running out of ideas...
GF

I do get a boot error, but what do you mean by a 'rescue console' Do you mean boot up in dos and try commands? or... the command prompt in windows?

OK, you get access to the recovery console through your original installation CD. You need to boot from the CD, by leaving the disk in your CD drive and rebooting. Your computer should run a text based setup, one of which options is to Repair - select this by hitting R.

This should leave you at a prompt asking you for your Administrator password, and then you're left at a DOS-esque prompt, where you can run the above commands.

GF

Ok garth you have been a great help, this sounds like it will work. As soon as I can get my hands on a Windows XP disk I will try these commands... untill then I will sit here with an ugly look on my face.

If you're desperate, and if you've got access to another computer, (and you've got a lot of time) you can access the Recovery console using a utility on Microsoft's website. It'sessentially the setup loader, for those computers which don't support booting from CD (maybe they still exist?). You can get them here:
www.microsoft.com
www.microsoft.com
www.microsoft.com

If you're one isn't there, so a search. It's about 4MB.
GF

Well Garth, its been a while since my last post, and I am still ticked that I cant fix this prob. I tried this : Removing the 8gig harddrive and Installing WinXP Home on the 40, re-formatted and re-installed WinXP completly.. It would run through The XP setup just dandy, then it would want a restart. It would restart and find no previous installation. It restarted the XP Setup complety and this looped on and on. Then this is the really odd part. I put the 8gig back in and restarted........ Then the XP intallation resumed and finished and I was back to my previous state. Now when I take that 8gig HDD out, It cant find a boot again. What am I to do?

I wonder if the whole product activiation may be causing issues. I've not run into this before so it's just a curious thought.

Does anything happen if you install XP Pro on the 40GB? I'm curious if the 8 is where the boot menu is located because it has Pro on it (I know, it doesn't make sense, but anything can happen when MS is involved). What happens if you install just the 8GB drive and remove the 40? When you format it, do you fdisk or just (quick) format?

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