Formatted c: after installing new OS on e:

[bassie]

Hi,

I have two hard drives. I had xp installed on c: (is the old hard drive, primary master ide0)
I installed xp on e: (is the new hard drive, secondary master ide1)

What have I done:
after installing a working XP-os on e:, set all the right parameters, I formatted C....(well done..) because I wanted to use this old hard drive for other data.

So, after restarting windows wouldn't boot anymore, because my MBR was probably deleted?

my question is:

Besides changing the drives into primary and secondary master and installing a new copy of XP on the new harddrive what else can I do?

Many thanks in advance

 

[IRstuff]

You do need to have boot.ini on the system boot drive that points to the correct location for the OS. The file on my system looks like:

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


TTFN

 

[bassie]

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect

Where in this case disk = ide1 ?
something like

multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect

so, default is pointing to an empty c-drive, disk(0), with no os, with no timeout for a multiboot, therefore it is not booting and asking for a missing .ini file? Because I formatted the C-drive or am I confusing u now?

 

[IRstuff]

I assume that what you did was:

c: and e:, both in system
install xp on e:


This would leave the bootloader and boot.ini on c:, both of which you need. The bootloader is located on track0 and is what actually goes and reads boot.ini to find the OS.

I think the simplest thing is to re-configure e: as c: and re-install.

TTFN

 

[bassie]

Thanks IRstuff, I did and it works fine now.