Cant boot XP Pro from D: on a Dell

T

Thehelix

n00b
Joined
Mar 14, 2005
Messages
7
Happy Friday, enough of the nonesense!

I gots me a Dell P4 1.6Ghz
I booted from C: which was runnung 98SE (not enough space to install XP)
Then I installed XP Pro from CD onto D: preserving existing files.
I unplugged the C: and removed the XP install CD.
Power up....
Now she gives me a black screen with a short message in white letters to the effect that there is no boot hardware.
Restart and go into BIOS
The BIOS recognizes the IDE drive, but the only choice to boot from are the floppy and CD drive.

Any thougts here?

Thanks All!
 
when you installed XP on the D: it probley wrote the boot record as having 98 on the C: and XP on the D:, that boot record sits on the C:, so that drive has no way of knowing xp is on there, so it can't boot to it. I might be way off but it makes sense (i havent dual booted since the days of Corel linux). By far the best way to do it install XP clean on that drive.
 
The boot.ini files which are need to boot always goes on the first hard drive.
In your case it was the C: drive.
So when you removed that drive you removed all the boot info.

Just do a full install with only the D: drive in your system and the boot files will be installed on that drive.

Luck........ :D
 
Or you can cheat the re-install and plug the C back in and copy the boot.ini to the D. Then modify the boot.ini so it reads something like:

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

And that should work. Except when you boot to D: it will keep the D: as it's primary drive. I say just unplug C and reinstall to get your HD to label as C:

I think haha
 
Grimmda
I like your suggestion. I like being clever, but with the time lost I will get caught being clever by half....
On to complete install.

Helix out!
 
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