OS issue

[Wangie444]

Ok, here is the problem. Originally, I had 1 IDE Hard drive with 80gb. On it I had Xp. Ok now, I bought a new Hard drive. It is a SATA. I installed xp on that. I discovered that if i set the booting order to The IDE first which is the C: drive, It would ask me to load an OS from either hard drive. Now I though this was handy, because I could select which one I want without changing the boot order. Also another important this is windows did this, not bios or anything. After the boot screen it would be windows can boot etc... The downside of this is when I change my SATA hard drive to boot first, itll say boot error, Instert system disk. So as long as I have the IDE drive to boot first, Its ok. However, One day, I was stupid enopugh to wipe the 80gb hard to run linux. Then i switched back to windows, however, it doesnt ask me to select an OS, so It is impossible to get into my SATA hard drive. What should I do?

[RicheemxX]

The problem is that your MBR (master boot record) is located on the ide drive. This happened because you had both drives active during the installation of XP on the 2nd drive.

What you can do, is from your XP installation CD enter the recovery console and run fixboot and fixmbr. If you are going to run both Linux and Windows then you can use grub or some other boot loader like easybcd to create a boot record that will give you the option which OS to choose at startup

[Wangie444]

ok, I ran FIXMBR, and said it was successful, but when I tried FIXBOOT, it said it said the drive i provided was incorrect or it cant find the windows folder even though I theres only 1 drive connected. ok when i connect both drives it works. but it doesnt work

[BipolarBill]

I've attached a Zip file. Unzip the files to your SATA drive. After that, run a repair install of XP:

How to Perform a Windows XP Repair Install

You could try booting the drive without running the repair. If it fails, you *must* repair.

[Wangie444]

where do i extract? desktop or windows folder?

[BipolarBill]

Neither. Extract directly to the SATA drive root. If it's the D drive, extract to the D drive. These are bootfiles.

Once they are extracted, remove the other drive and set BIOS to boot from the SATA drive.

[BipolarBill]

Well - did it work?

[BipolarBill]

I just now edited the attachment above. The original may not work. This new one should.