editing boot.ini

H

HavoKane

n00b
Joined
Jan 28, 2005
Messages
6
ok, my dad has a new dell demension 9100. it same with 2 100gb sata drives in a raid 0.

i bought a 100gb sata drive to be seperate. i want to dual boot them. both of them have xp home on them. the trbouble is, my dad wanted me to disconnect his drives before installing mine so that i wouldnt accidentally mess his up. now we have to drives that think they are primaries. how do i edit the boot.ini to make my dads drive the default booter, but still load the windows bootloader to be able to choose which drive i want to boot off of.

example:

[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS dads drive
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP dad" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP HavoKane" /fastdetect
........^........ ^ ........^ .............^

[font=&quot]what do i need to edit? how do i make my drive a secondary?
(arrows are pointing to area of edit in question)


edit:

ok, so i made a new boot.ini file. my dads HDD works fine, but it bluescreens when i try to open mine. heres what i have:

DADS BOOT.INI
[/font]
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="XP Games Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

MY BOOT.INI

 [boot loader]

timeout=30

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

[operating systems]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="XP Games Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect


fake edit:
my dads says partition 2, but it is a seperate drive. its just set up funny. it came like that from dell.
 
Dell ships their pc with a diag or reccovery partition. Where it is and it's size I am not sure about. You can run all the drives and just boot to the correct ones. However, they will all be read/write unless you change their perimissions.

Go under right click "My Computer" and select manage. Look at "Disk Management"
You will see the disk numbers and partitions. Edit your boot.ini for the desired boot partition.
 
If you go to device manager and find you hd, go to properties hit the volume tab and populate....Does it come up as disk 2? Since i believe his raid 0 setup is using 0 and 1 for the 2 hard drives with his system.

If this is the case, then rdisk should be 2 not 1
 
find a copy of Norton Ghost...inside will be a program called gdisk.exe.

that program will allow you to hide/unhide partitions very easily.
 
did anybody even read what the problem was? rougetrip's response was the only one that even slightly pertained to my question. thanks anyway i guess. still need some help though.
 
HavoKane said:
<snip>
edit:

ok, so i made a new boot.ini file. my dads HDD works fine, but it bluescreens when i try to open mine.

<snip>
fake edit:
my dads says partition 2, but it is a seperate drive. its just set up funny. it came like that from dell.
[/font]
Click to expand...
first edit: my guess is, when you have both drives in...one has to be C drive and ususally that is determined by the order in which the drives were discovered. When you installed on your drive, did you disconnect your dad's drive? Was it C drive? If not, the installation wrote system files on C drive and you are trying to boot w/o a c drive (system file drive).

second edit: If there is a hidden partition (or two), then that would make sense...not funny. Using gdisk would unhide those partitions and probably boot off of them.
 
type(x)disk(y)rdisk(z)partition(a)path or
multi(x)disk(y)rdisk(z)partition(a)path


Example:

[boot loader]
timeout=0
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


type Identifies the disk controller.
If the disk controller is SCSI, the type is scsi. Other disk controllers, such as IDE and ESDI, are referred to as type multi.
On some SCSI systems, you also use multi.

x The number of the adapter in the order it is loaded by Windows NT.
For computers with only a single adapter, x is always 0.
Note that all buses of a multi-bus adapter are referred to with the same value for x.
For example an Adpatec 2742AT controller has two SCSI buses.
They are both referred to with the same x value, since they are part of the same controller card.

y Calculated by multiplying the bus number (on multi-bus adapters) by 32 and adding the target ID of the drive.
For controllers of type multi, y is always 0.

z The device’s logical unit number (LUN). For controllers of type multi, z is 0 for the master drive and 1 for the slave drive.
For SCSI systems, this is always 0.

a The number of the partition on the disk.
To figure out the partition number you want, remember this: MS-DOS extended partitions (type 5) are not counted, nor are unused partitions (type 0).
Starting with 1, count the primary partitions first, then the logical drives. If there is only one partition on the drive, this value is always 1.

path The directory where you installed Windows NT/2000, such as \WINNT, \WINDOWS, \WINNT2K, \WINNT40, or \WINNT35.
 
One thing to try is Go to Start-> Run. Type in MSCONFIG. Hit enter.
Click on the BOOT.INI tab. Click on "Check all boot paths".
It will check to see which ones are valid, and then ask you if you would like to delete the invalid ones. I don't know if it will add them for you but it won't hurt anything to try it.

IMHO you would have been better off leaving the other drive connected. The second install would have replaced the boot files and setup the boot.ini for you. Now you have to sort out the controller number, drive number and partition number. Not an easy task if you have SATA , IDE and RAID on the same board. And what's with the my boot.ini and dads boot.ini? There should be only one boot.ini file in the root directory on the active partition that the BIOS is set to boot off of. The one boot.ini file loads the OS based on what you have set as default or what you select manually.
 
Ok, maybe rebuilding the boot.ini first (works only on XP/2k/NT):
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000648.htm

Other than that all i can dig up is using a boot manager from majorgeeks in the driver utilities setion, or booting YOUR XP on YOUR drive and reinstalling windows to let the boot.ini be build agian, which seems like maybe the above link may do for you?

Can you boot your dads drive up and take a snapshot of the diskmanagement in computer management in the administrative tools, then post here, i could swear it just seems that it should be multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(?)partition(1)\WINDOWS="........" /fastdetect

I see in your first post that partition is split like partiti on, a typo could be the problem but would seem relevent that both copies of XP wouldn't load then.

Good luck, report back!

edit: hope you have a original copy of XP around or can atleat borrow one to boot the setup on, the rebuild method may not work on recovery disk which i dunno if dell still does it that way.
 
ntldr will read the boot.ini on whichever drive is setup as the boot drive in the bios, leave the other boot.ini alone completely. Now which setting you change depends on your motherboard, it could be on a different controller, the same controller, etc. So just play with the numbers untill you get something that works. (You should already know the partition number, which unless you partitioned something oddly would be one) I never tried using msconfig, but if that can check for correct entries it sure sounds better than having to reboot every time so you may want to try that.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top