So i had my pc set to dual boot. the boot drive was C and had Xp64 on it. However, the main OS i used is xp32 and it was on a separate drive (F).

My C drive has failed. Not even showing up in bios. It's an 8yr old 60gb ide drive, and I don't care about it nor do i have anything on it i need to recover.

However, I can't boot to XP b/c the boot stuff was on C. So, is there an easy way to set my other drive to boot?

if there's no way to set that drive to boot directly, I have a 200gb drive sitting around. I could install xp or another os and set it up to dual boot again. Seems kinda stupid, but i could make it work at least.

Ideas or suggestions?

4/12/2009 7:57:37 PM

sure.

pop in your XP setup cd, go into the recovery console, run fixboot

4/12/2009 7:59:30 PM

I messed up my Windows 7 installation earlier last week and the only way I've been able to boot into it has been bringing up my bios' boot menu and selecting the specific drive my install is located on.

Fixboot, fixmbr, bootrec, etc would not work.

4/12/2009 8:06:37 PM

now that doesn't make any sense at all

are you sure you didn't mistakenly disable your hard drive in the BIOS boot order?

4/12/2009 8:18:47 PM

Now that I think about it, it does seem a bit weird. The bootloader spits out an error I've never seen before, but when I select the raptor it boots right to windows. I'm not going to reboot this second, but I'll try to grab it and I did unplug the drive so maybe the bios removed it, but I didn't recall seeing the actual drive in the priority list just your generic "Boot to HDD"

[Edited on April 12, 2009 at 8:35 PM. Reason : holy runon sentence batman]

4/12/2009 8:34:35 PM