Boot drive issue.

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Nevermore

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I recently bought a new SATA drive, and planned to remove my old IDE drive to place in a computer im building from spare parts. Anyway, when I remove the IDE drive I cant boot my SATA windows installation, because, like an idiot, I left the IDE drive hooked up when I installed windows on the SATA drive, and I guess the boot info wound up on the IDE drive. Any ideas how I could move that boot info to the SATA drive w/out losing any of my data?

btw, windows will boot from the sata drive, but it takes about 10 mins, and then when it gets there it just brings up my background and a mouse cursor, no desktop icons, no start menu or taskbar, nothing.

Thanks!
 
what does the boot.ini look like?
You did install the system onto that drive corect? Can you do it again, without the IDE so that you get the correct drive entries in place?
 
if i do it again, will I lose windows settings and data?

where can I find the boot.ini? i did a search and turned nothing up.
 
Doesn't make any sense. The SATA should automatically be read in the CMOS as the Master...the IDE as the secondary master. I take it you installed Windows fresh on the SATA....right? It makes no sense to me that the boot.ini file would be any place other than that on the SATA. REformat the sata and try a fresh install. Did you try to pull the Sata and see if the IDE drive would boot up? so I guess I don't se the dilema here unless you are saying that somehow the boot.ini for the sata is just on the ide drive and neither is bootable?????? Is that it>?....very confusing.
 
well, it works fine w/ the ide drive in. but when i take the ide out (which i need to do), the sata drive wont boot windows quite right.

windows will boot from the sata drive (when the IDE drive is not present), but it takes about 10 mins, and then when it gets there it just brings up my background and a mouse cursor, no desktop icons, no start menu or taskbar, nothing.
 
set your bios to boot from the sata drive first. I use to use my bios to switch OS's until I found an easier way to do it.
 
if i do it again, will I lose windows settings and data?

can I just re-install to the same directory, or will that make me lose any data on the partition? what about the registry?
 
disconnect the ide drive. then you need to fix the mbr to the sata.

now take the sata out and put the ide back in. fix the mbr.

now put both back in. see which system boot up. use partition magic (you might be able to use disc management) to hide the other partion. now when you want to got to that partition, use partition magic or disc management to set the other partion active and reboot
 
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