This one is going to truly require an expert. Last week I was having all sorts of problems with my machine. It got to the point were I couldn't even reboot. With hundreds of important files on my machine I had to find a way to get the thing to boot up (at the time I couldn't even get it running in safe mode).
I have two hard drives (master and slave) in my machine so I thought the best way to solve my problem would be to install Windows on the slave drive. To simplify things let's call the master Drive "A" and the Slave drive "B". I use "B" exclusively for file back up purposes - there is no OS or any applications that run from this drive - all that stuff is installed on "A". I have important files on both drives so I didn't format either before doing a fresh installation of XP on "B". Everything went smoothly - that is until I swapped the drives. When I swapped the hard drives (i.e. made "B" the master and "A" slave - and yes I've got the right jumper settings) and changed my BIOS settings to boot from "B" the system wouldn't boot up. The only way I could get it to boot up was to set the BIOS settings to boot from "A". As the system starts up it recognizes that there are two Operating Systems it needs to choose from - one on "A" and one on "B". When I select the OS on "B" the system boots with no issues - everything works.
This lead me to believe that a boot sector wasn't created on drive "B" when I installed XP. So I went into the XP repair mode and added a boot sector with the BOOTCFG /ADD command. I then did FIXBOOT and followed that up by making it the default boot sector by doing BOOTCFG /DEFAULT. Everything seemed to work but I still can't get the machine to boot directly from "B".
Below is the contents of the Boot.ini file:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdi
sk(1)parti
tion(1)\WI
NDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)par
tition(1)\
WINDOWS="M
icrosoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
Just to recap "B" is now my master drive and I've created a boot sector but the machine will not boot directly from "B". I need to start the boot sequence from "A" then select the operating sytem on "B" to get everything up. I really really really do not want to delete everything on "B" and start over. Is there anybody that can help me?
Many thanks.
