Windows booting problem.

Glaucus

Glaucus

Glaucus

Man of Honour
Joined
11 Mar 2004
Posts
76,637
I've just put an IDE hdd (slave) into my computer, it has a full version of windows on it.
My real install of windows is on a sata hdd.
Now the computer keeps trying to boot up from the IDE HDD and thus crashes, but I can't seem to find any options in bios to tell it to boot up off the sata hdd.

Any ideas.
 
Thats because both drives have windows on them and its not correctly setup to dual boot, or at least that would be my guess, how does the PC know which one is the right one to boot from.

Can you format the IDE drive, is there important data on it you need?
 
t31os said:
Thats because both drives have windows on them and its not correctly setup to dual boot, or at least that would be my guess, how does the PC know which one is the right one to boot from.

Can you format the IDE drive, is there important data on it you need?
Click to expand...

Surley there must be a way of telling it to boot up of a particular drive?

Don't want to format it has the windows installed from another computer, I just need to transfer 80GB of files across. No network possible.

Or is there away to create a dual boot page?
 
Depends what BIOS you have - some of them allow you to go to a boot menu and select what partition/drive to boot from.

I think it's loading the MBR from the IDE drive now, which points to the bootable windows partition on that drive for start-up. Since you can't get to the boot.ini file on that partition (in which you could have added another entry to boot the windows partition on your SATA drive) .

I think your BIOS is the best place to look. Or maybe a boot manager program?
 
It sounds like you have taken the drive from a working machine to copy the files to the new machine and you then intend to put the drive back in the other machine??


In that case could he not put it back and edit the boot.ini from the other machine?


Lee
 
Bales1983 said:
It sounds like you have taken the drive from a working machine to copy the files to the new machine and you then intend to put the drive back in the other machine??


In that case could he not put it back and edit the boot.ini from the other machine?


Lee
Click to expand...

That's exactly what I'm doing
 
This is what the boot.ini looks like at the min on the sata drive

Code: 
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

However on another sata drive I have vista as well, so I would like to add that in anyway

Then the ide as well, I realise I need to edit the ide one not the sata one.

But how do I find out what the partion is?

ie:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)
 
just increase the disk number, if you have 1 bootable partition per drive. The disk numbers should be the same as in your BIOS.
 
Dr_Evil said:
just increase the disk number, if you have 1 bootable partition per drive. The disk numbers should be the same as in your BIOS.
Click to expand...


I have two sata drives each with 2 partitions.
Windows xp on sata D:\
Vista on F:\
Then 2 for files
C:\
and
e:\

I know vista and xp are on different drives, but I don't know which physical driver there on.

Then 2 partitions on the ide as well...

Ohh my head hurts.

Code: 
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="Windows 2000" /fastdetect

Thats an example, what is the bit for vista is it still windows or something else. I'm thinking winnt, windows is the default directory?

So my original
Code: 
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOW  S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

revised to add vista
Code: 
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOW  S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Vista" /fastdetect

Does that look right?
 
Last edited:
maybe start your system with a dos floppy then do an fdisk to see what the drive and partition numbers are exactly.
 
Surely your bios allows you to change the boot order and disable devices? Can't you disable the IDE hard disk as a boot option?

Man of honour? What did I miss brown noser? :D

Edit: if you boot with the Windows CD into recovery console you can get it to list the bootable installations and rebuild the boot.ini file for you. Safer to do if you don't know what you're doing with the boot.ini.

Something like bootcfg /list than bootcfg /rebuild. Can't remember exactly off the top of my head but if you type help at the recovery prompt it will display which one it is.
 
Last edited:
Jonny69 said:
Surely your bios allows you to change the boot order and disable devices? Can't you disable the IDE hard disk as a boot option?
Click to expand...
It allows you to order them, but it didn't work

Thanks guys!!!! :) it's all fixed know, realised I didn't need to know everything, just need to copy the boot.ini from sata to the ide. Bobs your uncle it worked.

Jonny69 said:
Man of honour? What did I miss brown noser? :D
Click to expand...

Not exactly sure what I did but :D
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17671574&highlight=man+honour
 
The boot.ini was what i was thinking when i mentioned the dual boot, i didnt know if adding the line would work. Guess the simple fixes do work sometimes... aye ;)
 
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