In XP boot loader question

[linderman]

Hello all

I have a question regarding a dual boot senario

I have a Fujitsu hard drive which has had Win XP Pro on it and working well for over a year and half. Today I install a new Western digital 320 gig sata drive and installed Win XP pro on it.

My intention is to; at my leasure, get the new drive fully loaded with all my programs and personal settings, once this has been done, I will "live" in the new install OS

at the beginning of the WD drive OS loading, I had the WD drive as first boot drive and the old Fuji as second boot

all went smooth, the boot loader shows at the beginning of the OS loading, allowing me the option of which drive I want to boot into >>>> the new WD drive is the first listed; the older drive is listed under that one, I have 26 seconds to choose which drive or it will auto default to the first Win XP listing; the WD drive

this part all works great

but now I want to change my boot order back to the Fuji as the first boot option in the bios with the newer WD drive booting second, when I do this I get an error message on the WD drive boot as saying the Hal.dll is missing or needs to be replaced ???

any suggestions how to fix this ??? if I return the WD to "first" boot in the bios, the whole set-up works fine again, but I dont want to have to select the second OS lisitng in the boot loader each time the computer re-boots

[adamt]

You can change the order by editing the file C:\BOOT.INI

The file will be hidden, read-only and marked as System, so you'll need to do something like:

attrib c:\boot.ini -S -H -R

Before you can make changes to it.

I'm sure XP has a nice GUI way of changing the settings in boot.ini, but I don't remember what it is.

[spacesurfer]

A more indirect and probably rather more difficult, but more versatile method, is to use Grub4Dos as your boot menu rather than XP's. See my signature for all the links.

You'll have to use the swap drive method to fool the BIOS to think HD1 is HD0 and HD1 is HD1. Basically, that is the problem you are having.