Botched installation

[kageyfna]

I just re-installed XP Home after losing my hard drive but have a slight problem. I have 2 hard drives, a 10GB(IDE) that is used for backup and the new 500gb(SATA). When installing I chose the 500GB for the install and that seems to be where it installed to.

The problem is if i remove the 10gb I get the a "No system disk" error. I can solve this by putting the 10gb back and putting the windows CD in(but not booting to CD just having it in there).

After I got everything back up I checked both disks and noticed the following files are on the 10gb.

autoexec.bat

boot.ini

config.sys

io.sys

msdos.sys

ntdetect.com

ntldr

What I'm wondering is if I can simply copy those files over to the 500gb or if there is something more that needs to be done. Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Mt.Dew]

When it comes to windows XP, it gives priority to IDE HD's over SATA drives. I do not think you can simply move those files to the SATA drive effectively. Basically it comes down to this.. Install windows onto the 10GB drive and then, ANYTHING else you install should go onto the SATA drive, both to save space on the IDE and to make anything on SATA drive load a bit faster due to the bandwidth of SATA. Your other option is, use the SATA only. I have tried many times on friends pc's that have one IDE HD and one SATA HD. The end result is as stated above: either install windows to the IDE and then any other programs to the SATA, or just run the SATA only.

[Tripredacus]

I just re-installed XP Home after losing my hard drive but have a slight problem. I have 2 hard drives, a 10GB(IDE) that is used for backup and the new 500gb(SATA). When installing I chose the 500GB for the install and that seems to be where it installed to.

The problem is if i remove the 10gb I get the a "No system disk" error. I can solve this by putting the 10gb back and putting the windows CD in(but not booting to CD just having it in there).

After I got everything back up I checked both disks and noticed the following files are on the 10gb.

autoexec.bat

boot.ini

config.sys

io.sys

msdos.sys

ntdetect.com

ntldr

What I'm wondering is if I can simply copy those files over to the 500gb or if there is something more that needs to be done. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Some of those are marked as protected system files, so you may have to use the attrib program to unprotect them before moving/replacing.

[Ken J]

I had this trouble also.

Solution

unplug the Ide drive.

re-Install Windows to the Sata drive.

Plug Ide drive back in.

Problem solved.

Then copy Everything from the Ide to the Sata drive. Reformat the Ide drive to remove the xp install.

Restore backup to IDE.

When I do a reinstall of windows I'm now unplug all 5 hard drives leaving just the one that gets the install.

This way I can not accidentily erase the wrong drive as I always delete the partition and reboot then recreate partition.

Windows then does not see any old install.

Ken

[nmX.Memnoch]

When it comes to windows XP, it gives priority to IDE HD's over SATA drives.

That's not entirely true.

It all depends on the boot order you have specified in your BIOS at the time you do the installation. If you have the boot order specified the way you want it and load the SATA drivers (if necessary) then you can use a SATA drive as the system drive without any problems.

As an aside, Windows calls the drive that hosts those files (NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, etc) the "System Drive" and if your Windows install is on a different drive, that drive is called the "Boot Drive". Yes, I know...it's backwards, but that's the terminology used within Windows.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314470/

[kageyfna]

Solution

unplug the Ide drive.

re-Install Windows to the Sata drive.

Plug Ide drive back in.

I was hoping to avoid this but since the install is fresh and I haven't gone to the trouble of installing any games yet I think this will be the easiest solution. Thanks for all the responses guys