foogledricks Posted August 5, 2004 Report Share Posted August 5, 2004 Built a new computer. Installed XP on a temporary harddrive with the intention of ghosting that installation over to a partition on bigger faster drive later. I have had some problems. First, I ghosted the XP installation partition to the third partition on the destination drive (drive letter k:). This seemed to work successfully. When I removed my temporary drive, partition K: becomes partition H:. Anyway, I made the drive containing partition K: the master IDE and rebooted. The BIOS doesn't see it. So I installed the temp drive, ran Partition Magic, and learned a few things that I don't quite understand. My drive K: has a status, and it is set to NONE. It is also a logical drive instead of a PRIMARY drive. Finally, it is not within the first 4 GB of the physical drive. I don't know what any of this means, particularly for the issues I'm having, but I decided to create a new 2.5 GB partition that will be PRIMARY, ACTIVE, and with the first 4.0 GB of the physical drive. After doing that, using Windows Explorer, I copied the contents of my partition K: to this new partition (do I need to GHOST to it rather than copy?). Anyway, I rebooted, the BIOS still didn't recognize Windows, though it did give a LBR error message... and it does try to boot up, but freezes on the Win XP screen. At this point I thought that maybe the Win XP CD might help me repair the installation in some way, but all it did was give me a dos prompt. So I decided to GHOST my k:partition to my new partition. I'll try that tonight. Can someone please explain what properties of a drive and/or partition makes the BIOS boot to it? Separately, can I stick a harddrive as a slave to my CD-ROM on the secondary IDE controller? Always wondered that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Whooter Posted August 5, 2004 Report Share Posted August 5, 2004 Moved to Tech Support... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ricky G Posted August 12, 2004 Report Share Posted August 12, 2004 I'm not sure exactly how to remedy your situation, but I have answers to a few or your questions. Can someone please explain what properties of a drive and/or partition makes the BIOS boot to it As far as I know, it defaults to the c: drive, on the primary partition can I stick a harddrive as a slave to my CD-ROM on the secondary IDE controller Yes, just make sure jumpers are set accordingly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ricky G Posted August 12, 2004 Report Share Posted August 12, 2004 Also try this link, it explains how to modify boot.ini to boot to an extended partition. http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/editbini.htm Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ryan FB Posted August 12, 2004 Report Share Posted August 12, 2004 At this point I thought that maybe the Win XP CD might help me repair the installation in some way, but all it did was give me a dos prompt. If you boot to the recovery console by pressing R when prompted using the XP Install CD, run FIXBOOT followed by running FIXMBR, and see if that solves your problem. Separately, can I stick a harddrive as a slave to my CD-ROM on the secondary IDE controller? Always wondered that. Yes, however performance may be degraded. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foogledricks Posted August 12, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 12, 2004 Better late than never! I am writing from my fully functioning machine, having installed XP twice. I will however consider ghosting my new installation for future restorations. And should doing so render me unbootable, I will try the FIXBOOT and FIXMBR you suggested. Thanks! How was I supposed to know that?!?!?! Couldn't Microsoft make those menu items for god sake?!?! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.