XP on D Drive

[dougford]

Hello all,
Hopefully there will be someone out there much smarter than myself who can help me with this.
I am running XP Pro on a machine with two 80GB hard drives. I had the XP installation as per normal on the C drive. After months of good work I had weeks of trouble with the machine out of the blue, and after checking for viruses etc and reloading XP several times, I concluded that the C drive was faulty. (evidenced by repeated disc scans and bad sectors discovered etc.) Finally being unable to operate the C drive to any practical level, I loaded a new installation of XP onto the D drive. I have relaoded all programmes and other than the loss of all my emails everything has been working fine for a few weeks.
My problem is that I now wish to recover whatever I can from C and then replace it with a new drive. However, my preliminary experiments show this is not as easy as I had thought. Even though I loaded XP onto D, it still uses C for a part of the boot up process. I have tried copying the root files from C to D but if I then selec D as the boot up drive the computer hangs without starting XP.
Is there any way that I can keep D as the main drive and remove C? My fear is that on removing C I will not be able to boot up D. I am also concerned that C will eventually totally give up the ghost and I would need to start all over again with a new XP and reloading all the programmes.
Any ideas from the forum would be much appreciated.
Regards,
Doug

 

[Apokalipse]

swap around the D and C drives (so D becomes C and vice versa) then if you can't get anything off the new D drive try and reformat it

 

[chesman]

ok, if you did a brand new clean install of XP on your slave hard drive.Then it should not have to use c: at all to boot.

basiclly, here is what u are going to have to do to get up and runing , while backing up your files as well.

1: Change your hard drives around on the IDE cable so that the one withthe OS is master.

2: you should be able to see the second hard drive in 'my computer' now, so open it and collect all the files you want to back up. (taht is if this drive is usable.) and make sure you put all the files onto your primary hard drive, the one with XP on it.

3: take out both hard drives, put in the brand new drive and then install XP on that.

4: boot the computer and make sure everything wroks fine

5: next, put back the hard drive that had XP on it before, and set it as slave once again.

this is the deja vu part

6: now, you know all those files you backed up form the first drive? well putthem wiht the files you want backed up on the current drive,and putthem on the master drive

7: format the slave drive u just took everythng off of, and then just pop all your files and stuff back up tere, and then you should have a good, working operational computer once more.


hope it helps

Ches
Have a great day

 

[gordon-guru]

HOLD ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! you don't have to do all of that, the easiest way to fix your boot problems is to go into the bios and change the boot sequence from IDE0 to IDE1 and it will only try to boot from your D: drive