Installing Old Boot Drive - System Current Boot Drive
Sep 19, 2007
I have an old HD From a system that I got rid of. I want to put it into a friends system to see if I can retrieve the files off of it and put it onto my external HD. The hard drive was the boot disk and the computer I am installing it on has it's own boot disk. If I boot up with two boot disks will there be a problem? Is there anything I need to take into account before doing this? I am planning on installing the old HD onto an ATA cable that I unplugged from the DVD drive. The HD that is in this system is not on an ATA cable, I'm not sure what it is connected to, just a small plug with a blue cable going to the mother board.
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Jul 8, 2005
I am planning to invest in a copy of MAC OS X and wondering if the OS can be installed on PCs and dual booted with Windows XP
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Mar 8, 2006
I have a dual boot system (2 hard drives) booting Suse and XP and boot up through Suse's built in boot manager which gives me the option of booting to Windows or Linux. But since I barely ever use Linux I want to delete it off the 2nd drive so I can use it for a storage drive, so I'm wondering how to replace the Windows Master Boot Record so I can just boot into my XP drive. I'm scared that once I delete/reformat the contents of the 2nd hard drive (I'll probably use Partition Magic to do this through my XP drive) that I won't be able to boot XP up anymore. So before I do anything I want to just be able to boot into XP and bypass the linux drive before I delete it to make sure everything is ok.
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Jan 22, 2006
I bought a computer for my wife and kids. Well months go by and my wife tries to install something and notices that the MAIN drive is H: not C:
I figured that it was weird but no big deal. Well I purchased a printer for her and while trying to install the software it was giving me a "Windows - No Disk in Drive" error.
I did some research and spoke to HP tech support and they suggested that I search the web for a way to change the drive letters from H: (current hard drive) to C: (supposed to be default drive)
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Jun 25, 2005
I have just built a new PC from new components. It boots into BIOS fine and detects all the drives - SATA HDD and CD. I have set up CD as boot drive, and installed the XP Pro disc. It immediately puts message "Setup is inspecting your hardware configuration..." and then just sits there doing nothing. I have left it for a long time so far but nothing is happening. This is repeatable. Do I need to do something different eg load drivers from a floppy or is there a problem with my hardward set up?
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Oct 8, 2008
I recently installed a new hard drive into a friends computer and installed XP Home.
I ran all the updates and service packs.
I left later that day and let him install all his applications.
I got a call tonight from him saying he really screwed up and doesn't know what to do.
I had to follow his thinking over the phone so I hope I get this all correct.
He had trouble loading the drivers for his HP printer. He would get an error saying that a C: empHP_WebRelease folder was missing. He did manage to figure out that for some reason when I installed XP it called the Boot drive "I" instead of "C"
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Dec 19, 2004
I'm trying to install Windows XP on my new Serial ATA hard drive, it has been formatted everything seems ok, When I start installing windows XP pro on this machine it seems like it just can't detect the damn hard drive, when I set it as boot on te serial ata drive eeverything works fine, it goes as C:/ but I just can't switch to my cd drive with windows XP to install it.When I boot up my other hrd drive with windows xp, I can actually see my hard drive in windows explorer.
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Aug 22, 2007
I got a computer from my boss that had a bad motherboard and processor, i put a new in it and now im trying to format the hd but it has xp on it and has a password, my boss forgot what it was so im trying to format it from dos i wrote "format c:" and it says
"The type of the file system is NTFS. Enter current volume lable for drive C:
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Sep 22, 2010
I am try to two partition drive C and drive D in my computer but only one c or d instoling. i have 4000mb hardrive,please tell me how can i instol partition in my window xp professional.
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Oct 9, 2005
800 MHz processor PC with 256MB RAM and a WD hard drive. She runs Windows XP Professional on it. She walked away from her computer for awhile, and when she came back there was a black screen on it saying basically that it couldn't find any of the devices that are actually attached to the computer i.e. hard drive, CD-ROM. It also said boot record not found. So I decided to have her try the Windows Recovery Console to try and help fix the boot.ini file. Well, when she typed in the command, it didn't work and said invalid entry or system drive not found.
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Oct 9, 2010
i am having problems with installing usb drive as it shows up in disk management but my computer won`t detect it anyone have any ideas how i can solve the problem i have a gigabyte ga-g31m-es2l motherboard,i am running windows xp 64 bit
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Oct 31, 2007
my old boot drive was g: .. i followed this guide here and changed it to c:upon restarting .. the system doesn't load up .. it gets stuck on the Welcome screen and that's it .. am i screwed?
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Nov 5, 2007
I have a HP ze5568cl laptop (Windows XP SP2). For a few years we've had trouble with the power connector. We've just wiggled the power cable to keep it connected and lived with the problem. It also gets very hot and the fan runs constantly. Yesterday when I powered it on there was no power, absolutely nothing. My husband has some electronic knowledge so we took the laptop apart and he soldered the loose part of the power connector. While he was doing that I cleaned the fan (couldn't believe how much dust was in there.When we plugged in the power cable the orange light came on so we were excited. When we powered it on all the keyboard lights lit up so we thought we had fixed the problem but.that's all it did. It went no further except that the fan kicked on.There is a clicking noise coming from the cd drive about every second with the green light flashing. I suppose it is checking to see if there is a bootable cd in the cd drive. I have attempted to change the boot order by holding F1, then F2 but it still continues to try to read the cd drive. I can't get to the screen that will allow me to change the boot order.
I also put the OS disk in the cd drive, hoping that it would start with the disk but it just clicks. Hubby removed the cover of the cd drive and I could see that the cd is spinning.There were no problems with this laptop prior to the power problem. It was really working very well especially considering the age of it.
The information in my sig is not for the computer with the problem. It's actually for an old computer which my son now has at college.
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Jul 20, 2010
I am receiving the following error at startup: "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter" There are no CD's in the CD drive. However, I ran the System Diagnostics and when it got to the Disk section - it is not recognizing the disk - it said Warning...and to check the cables. I have done that, and everything seems to be connected correctly.
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Jun 25, 2005
I have a MSi 875p motherboard with 1.5 gigs of ram, and a pentium 2.8 My hard drive is a Western Digital 740 raptor. When i boot my computer up, it is not recognizing the hard drive. I just goes through the boot agent screen and then says media tst failure, check cables. I bought a new ata cable, but the motherboard is still not recgnizing the drive, even with the bios settign set to automatically find it. this started teh other day when i got i n my case to dust it out. At first it was booting and tellin me that the dram timing was too tight but then it would not work at all.
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Feb 22, 2007
I have Windows XP home edition already installed on my system and I for some reasons I want to reinstall them on a different hard drive (I have 2 IDE drives). It is very important that my initial windows setup, the one I am running on now, will be working after the new installation too. Is that possible?
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May 11, 2007
About a month ago I decided to get a much bigger hard drive (500GB) but theres no way I have time to reinstall everything so I decided to clone my existing hard drive, I tried acronis and the clone went superfast and put everything onto a single partition the full size of the new disk - when I tried to boot up with the disk, it didnt boot. It got to the pale blue screen that usually says 'welcome' but instead it had a small windows XP logo and that was it, it didnt go any further. I contacted support and they were no help so last night I tried another free software hdclone - it took about 6 hours but I actually managed to boot up from the new disk - but the new drive had a single partition the exact same size as the old one and the rest was unused space - no problem
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Aug 30, 2008
I had a drive that was beginnning to squeal and i figured I could disable my drives one at a time to see which one was squealing. Of course, disabling the drives through the control panel doesn't actually keep them from spinning, so the whole thing was an exercise in boneheaded stupidity. Anyway, as soon as I disabled the c: drive the screen went blank (of course), and now when i try to reboot it complains about a non-system drive and asks me to insert a system disk. did I mention that this is a home-built system and it doesn't have a floppy, so i can't boot off the floppy? I tried booting off the XP install CD, but it won't except that either (this seems odd to me).
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May 25, 2004
I installed a Serial ATA hard drive. Booted from floppy,partitioned and formatted 120mb HD,with 2 partitions.
Connected my old IDE drive and booted from Norton Ghostdisc, cloned my old drive to the new one. Removed all drives and USB card readers except the new SATA drive. Windows will not fully boot, it halts at the blue Windows intro screen. Restarted Windows, and scandisk ran, but indicated drive letter "H" not "C", so I guess the windows installation is still looking in the original place for it's files, ie. the "C" drive, that's why it won't boot. You cannot change the "System" drive letter from "Computer Management" within XP, and I cannot get into Windows anyway. Is there a "work around" for this, other than a clean install? Even then, is it still going to be drive "H"? And that means another Windows activation. How many goes do you get for activation? I tried a windows repair installation, and reactivation (wasted). Windows then worked, sort of. Lots of things were missing and programs unuseable,as they were looking for their files on "C": so I went back to square 1, put my old drive back in for the moment
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Aug 10, 2009
Well like alot of people I made the mistake of selecting safeboot in the boot.ini file in the msconfig file after my comp got a virus and would not boot into safemode. The hard drive is in two partitions: the C drive used to contain windows, and the D drive which has the data i am trying to save. I don't have a Windows XP disc because it was already on the comp when i bought it. I have attempted to restore the windows files with Bart PE bootup image disc but it wiped out Windows XP completely from the C drive in the process, but the Data drive is still showing up with all its files intact.
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Nov 26, 2009
I have a dual boot system with both having windows xp.When I load into the 1st XP installation, the following is the list and assignment of the drives:
C : Local Disk (contains the 1st XP installation)
D : CD Drive
E : Local Disk (contains data and also few installed program folders)
F : Local Disk (contains the 2nd XP installation)
Initially when I noticed this drive arrangement after setting up the dual boot, I just left it as is, not knowing what to do.But nowadays I am having a lot of problems as the installed programs are not accessible because their target location keeps changing, everytime I keep switching between the two operating systems.How can I solve this problem?Can I do the follwing : Load into the 1st XP installation, and then change the drive letters (of the last three drives) such that they are matching the drive assignment as seen when loading into the 2nd XP installation.Here in a way I have kept the same drive name for both installations.But Will this work?I also have some of the program folders for the 1st xp installation stored in E drive, and after changing it to D drive, will all the links be properly converted upon restart?
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Apr 3, 2007
I have successfully cloned my primary c partition of a dual boot system with XP Pro on the 1st primary partition c: and XP Pro on the 2nd primary partition as d: I can boot into my XP on the c: drive with no problem, but when I attempt to boot into my XP on the D drive it hangs on the blue screen right before booting into the user profiles. And believe it or not it continuously loops making the windows startup sound and the shutdown sound. It does the same in safe mode. I will try to explain the process on what I did so it can help you experts figure out this dilemma that I'm having. My old drive an IDE 100GB IBM primary drive was partitioned into 3 parts:
c: 30GB FAT32 primary
d: 30GB FAT32 "
e: 30gb FAT32 "
All ran great in XP's on c: ,D: and :e except that i was running out of room in all the partitions and the drive is getting very old , I think (5yrs). I used XXClone Pro v.0.58.0 to clone my old c: and d: partitions to a WD IDE 160GB. I tried many other cloning proggys like Acronis True Image, Drive Clone, Paragon Drive Copy, Drive Image 2002, HDClone 3.1 Pro but they all either changed my new drive NTFS file system to FAT32 or made exact same size copies. I formatted and partitioned my new drive as follows:..............
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Mar 31, 2010
I had voltage fluctuations last night due a snowstorm and the voltage dropped crashing my PC.It now won't boot and gives the error that a file is corrupted.Windows/system32/config..The PC runs an OEM XP home edition on a SATA drive, the PC also has an IDE drive (D) but the OSes are on the C drive.Inside the XP installation I have Linux Mint installed.When I boot I get the 2 options I always used to , XP (default) and Linux Mint.XP won't boot when selected and gives the error above.The Linux Mint, also on C and in fact installed as a program within XP, will boot, hence I believe the SATA drive to be undamaged.I can see the C drive and all the XP files from the Linux installation.I've tried using the original full CD and the recovery console but when the recovery console opens all it can see is the IDE drive which it labels D (and of course doesn't contain the original XP install.I can't remember how I got XP on the SATA drive in the first place, I don't appear to have any Hard drive drivers in the case I keep all software CDs in and I'm a bit flummoxed. I can only imagine I just fitted it and loaded the XP install disc but that's at odds with what seems to be happening now.Spent a large part of today Googling but can't find anything that will fix this. so far.I don't want to have to wipe and re-install everything unless there's no option, it's a fast way to kill a couple of days over the holidays.
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Dec 29, 2006
An external hard drive. When it is on & I try to boot,I get the following error : Invalid system disk Replace the disk, and then press any key I then have to turn off the external & press any key to get it to boot. Is there a way that I can boot with that external turned on. Some setting I need to change perhaps? I have an E-Machines computer about 2 years old.
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Oct 2, 2009
My computer came with a 80gb HD with windows xp pro.. I had took a 180gb hd from another comp. that was running windows xp home and connected it as a slave drive. A window popped warning me that vital info. would be deleted in order to format/ partition the second drive (180gb HD). Was this a mistake doing it in this manner? If not...How would I go about using the whole "180gb" and not just the 35gb it's only allowing me to use. And is there any way to move files so that they will be protected?
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Sep 29, 2009
I'm running Windows XP and want to migrate to another hard drive. I used the excellent open source utility CloneZilla to clone my hard drive to the new drive, and used the equally excellent EASEUS Partition Master to resize the cloned partition to fill the new drive. Next I edited boot.ini on my original Windows to add the cloned drive as another boot option. After a bit of trial and error guessing the disk path for boot.ini I was able to dual boot into the original or the clone.
Now I want to boot off the new drive directly without dual booting off the original drive as I intend to wipe the old drive after I am satisfied that everything is working OK. But here's the catch: the original drive is SATA, while the new drive is IDE. So I can't simply swap the cables around and be done with it. So I configured the boot sequence in the bios to use "HDD-0" instead of "SCSI" (for some reason this old BIOS thinks SATA is SCSI) and restart. The system gets as far as detecting the boot source (floppy first, then CD-ROM) and then stops. No "operating system not found" or any other kind of error, just a blinking cursor and no activity.
I get exactly the same behavior using "HDD-1" to "HDD-3" as the boot drive in the bios. The bios detects the drive itself OK. I have also edited boot.ini on the new drive to point to the same location I used to add it to the dual boot menu on the original drive, but that didn't help. I also booted off the Windows installer, went into Recovery mode and ran Fixmbr and Fixboot with the original SATA drive unplugged and without specifying a device name.
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Aug 2, 2006
I'am using xp with service pack 2 i am using p4 2.8 ghz with 1024 ram maxtor 80gb hdd when i start my pc the logon screen does not show up if there is a cd/dvd on my dvd drive if i remove the dvd then restart then it's fine
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Jul 10, 2009
(*Get some free giggles out of M$'s definitions for a "system" and "boot" partition. Hint: the partition that is used to boot your machine is NOT called "boot", and the partition that holds your operating system is NOT called "system". http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314470)
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Oct 10, 2009
Trying to use the system recover cd.to try and repair windows xp pro. I get to the part where the screen is supposed to offer repair.My screen comes up showing partitions on the drive.It also says unknown disk but it lists the c: drive with 76246 MB and two other partitions.It just gives me the option to setup windows xp on the selected item or to select a different partition or delete a partition.I'm not getting the screen shown in the sticky.When i hit enter on the large partition it warned about installing two Operating System on the drive.Afraid to go farther,hoping I can save the files on the hard drive.
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Nov 22, 2009
I have just bought and installed (to the point of completing initialization under Disk Management) a new 1 TB hard drive. Originally, I was planning to use it solely for data storage.However, I am thinking of installing Windows XP Pro and all the programs I currently use on it, thereby making it the new OS and programs drive, while using the original 120 GB HD as a data/backup drive.I think the main appeal of doing this, for me, is that it also presents an opportunity to reinstall Windows on a machine which hasn't had this done for more than three years, and which currently seems to take at least five minutes to boot to a "usable" state, despite having a reasonably high spec for its age (it was bought in 2001, but as a result of the upgrade
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Nov 12, 2009
I managed to create a new partition on my Compaq Presario C700 laptop and install XP. (It came with Vista).First thing I noticed was that I can not detect any wireless networks or connect to the internet now. I am assuming that I need that driver and a whole bunch of other XP drivers as well. I have visited websites where they have a whole laundry list of drivers to download for my situation. Before I go through the painful process of downloading and installing all of them, I want to make sure this is really what I need to do.
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