Ooops! - boot.ini on wrong hard drive

[MrsCabbage]

I brought a new hard drive and finally (after many mess ups) managed to install a healthy new win 2000 operating system on my new hard drive. I now want to remove my old hard drive but it has the boot.ini and probably lots of other irritating boot important files I don't understand on it.

So the facts are that I have 2 hard drives that both have 2 partitions a primary and logical each. The drives look like this is the Storage - Disk managment thingy

Disk 0 (Basic) - (System - Primary) C: / Logical E:

Disk 1 (Basic) - (Boot - Primary) D: / Logical F:

Disk 1 is my new hard drive and I want to be able to remove Disk 0 but when I do it won't boot Disk 1.

I woulld be very grateful if someone could explain how I sort this as it would save me many hours of searching on google to try and work it out for myself.

[trackrat]

The easiest way is to disconnect your old hard drive, install your operating system on your new drive, then reconnect your old drive, if they are IDE drives make sure the new disk is set as master and the old disk set as slave.

Here are some pictures and information about setting up Master/slave configurations.

http://freepctech.com/pc/001/installing_ide_devices.shtml

[MrsCabbage]

Ah well yes I could do that - and realise I should have done that originally...

I don't want to do another install as it takes me ages (and hurts my brain) - so I am looking for help to solve the existing situation as is... without reinstalling the whole thing.

I bet there is an easy way of going about this - and I expect someone reading this right now knows how to do this and will hopefully share their knowledge with the less knowledgefull ;)

[trackrat]

Are your drives IDE (the big ribbon cable) and set to master and slave?.

Your new drive should have been set as master when you did the install

If you did not install it this way, disconnect the old hard drive and repair your new install following this URL.

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/networking/powe...-challenge-3124

[MrsCabbage]

Thanks. That looks very interesting.

I got into the repair thingy from the Windows 2000 CD disk I have and then got scared.

I wanted to check with you that if it repairs that it won't mean I will have to reinstall all my programs again?

My drives are set up as follows

Primary IDE

Master - Old hard drive

Secondary - DVD rom

Secondary IDE

Master - New hard drive with new install that won't boot by its lonesome

Slave - empty

I believe I have them all set to cable select.

I gotta go work now but be back tonight.

[trackrat]

Your new hard drive should be on the Primary IDE drive set as master set up your old drive as slave on the primary IDE, then set your DVD as master on the secondary IDE channel.

Your problem is having them set to cable select, if you read this URL you will see it needs another type of ribbon cable for cable select.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCS-c.html

[MrsCabbage]

Interesting info on that cable select business, although luckily I am using 80 ribbon cables so it seems things are OK for me.

Going back to your original advice (many thanks btw) I have done the emergency repair using an emergency repair disk with the windows 2000 CD (that I now have B) ) - but after saying it had done it when it rebooted nothing had changed. ie NTDLR is missing.

It is crazy as it seems I have important boot files on one drive with the main installation on another! And to think I was so proud of myself when I did the install about a month ago. I guess maybe I have just duffed up the original installation...

Is there any point of me still hoping for a solution to this?

[Alan2273]

Normally the boot file is corrupted whn you get that message, or it is trying to boot of a floppy or CD that does not contain that file.

You could try this.

If your computer is using Microsoft Windows 2000 and you are encountering the NTLDR error. Create the below boot.ini file on the floppy diskette drive.

[boot loader]

timeout=30

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT

[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

Copy the NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM files from another computer using the same Operating System. Both of these files are located in the root directory of the primary hard disk drive. For example, C:\NTLDR and C:\NTDETECT.COM should be the locations of these files on many computers.

Please keep in mind that these files are hidden system files, if you need additional help with viewing hidden files in Windows please see document CH000516.

Once these files have been copied to a floppy diskette reboot the computer and copy the NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM files to the root directory of the primary hard disk drive. Below is an example of what commonly should be performed from the A:\> drive.

copy ntldr c:

copy ntdetect.com c:

After the above two files have been copied, remove the floppy diskette and reboot the computer.