Had dual-boot but lost one drive...

D

davision

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 7, 2003
Messages
83
This is a tricky one I think.

I had a computer setup with dual-boot for XP and XP64. The OSes are on separate hard drives. The XP drive just failed and it was the original boot disk where the dual boot menu was set up -- so now I can't boot up at all.

I've tried changing the initial boot disk to the XP 64 drive in BIOS but it doesn't seem to work.

Is there anyway I can set up that "Dual boot menu" again on first boot so it will see the xp64 partition -- or any other way to get it directly boot into xp64?

I have one advantage in that I can get into Windows XP and mess around a bit because I stuck an old boot drive in place of the failed one. The old drive doesn't know about the xp64 partition so dual-boot isn't activated on it... but I can get into Windows and mess with files or whatever.
 
You need to boot from your XP x64 CD and run a repair on the boot sector and boot files on the secondary drive (and it would be easier if this drive was the only drive in the system).

This is why I am not a fan of dual booting, as I prefer keeping my OSes separate, and either using swappable drive cages, or VirtualBox.
 
How do I actually do the repair?

I don't know anything about the Recovery Console -- do I need to use that? -- or is there something simpler?
 
You would boot from the disc, and follow instructions to go into the Recovery Console. Then you would run fixmbr and fixboot, once you get to the command prompt, after you put in the admin password. I usually run a chkdsk as well anytime I'm in there, just out of habit.
 
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