robertpri

I want to get rid of that little FAT32 drive and just have two SATA's and the home security on the other two. The case does not hold 5 drives very well. Really jammed in there will little air circulation. And that FAT32 drive has the boot.ini file, so if something should happen to the primary drive, I have no way to boot or even get into the backup. I will try that EDITBINI approach as soon as I can. thanks

Okay, admitted, it's perhaps not the brightest method but it works, and I'm wondering if perhaps there is a simpler way? Have: one very small ATA FAT32 drive with windows 98 and boot.ini file. two SATA NTFS drives, one with XP Pro and the other is a dynamic backup copy. [that works fine] two ATA NTFS drives for our home security/home surveillance system. [this is mission critical; we're eldery and wife's health is poor; I need to monitor things] As I upgrade or replace a drive, bad things have happened. I have searched this site for boot.ini recommendations and trying to boot to an NTFS drive. I've learned a lot [thanks all] but mostly that accessing and then editing a boot.ini file on the primary NTFS boot drive is too complex for me. With my method, I can always get into that little FAT32 drive and edit the boot.ini file to "find" any NTFS drive that I want. Should I just leave well enough alone, or am I being really stupid about this? thanks [edit] sorry, just realized I moved threads and this should be in XP. New to this, and don't know how to move it.

grn, It sounds like we have the identical situation. Just found this thread. I have two ATA drives and two SATA drives which are now "copies" of the ATA drives. Like you, I want to only use the new SATAs. Compounding my issue is win98 on drive one, and XP on drive two. Win98 must load first to get boot.ini menu to work. This has worked perfectly for me with the two ATA drives, and I'm struggling to get them out of the box. It appears that I can remove the ribbons, boot to the SATAs, and then later reattach the ribbons for using the ATA as backups. I believe that is what you said. Right? [i've been chasing this for a week!] many thanks