Whoops, need help

[bitsmart]

OK folks, here's the sitch: I had WinXP Pro installed on drive C, and drive D was my media drive. I wanted to install XP on drive D, and switch the drive letters. I managed to get XP installed on drive D OK, cleared off drive C, and ran Partition magic so that I could format drive C and switch the drive letters. Unfortunately, when the computer rebooted for Partition Magic, something didn't go right and now I can't boot into Windows. My BIOS has limited choices for selecting boot devices (HDD, CDROM, or Floppy) so I can't get it to boot from the drive which has a perfectly good installation of Windows. I think I somehow managed to switch the drive letters by physically switching the IDE cable connections, but I still get a "Missing operating system" message, which tells me the computer is still looking for the OS on the empty drive, which I think is now drive D.

I can't find my XP setup disk or any emergency boot disks. I move around C:, D:, and A: with a regular system floppy disk, but that's it. Is there a way to make the good drive boot windows and/or is there a way to do a system restore from DOS?

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[T1junkie]

try using a boot disk and running Fdisk to set the primary drive

 

[mikesgroovin]

When you initially installed XP on the D: drive, were you dual booting at this point. If so, then your boot loader would have exsisted on the C: drive. This can be fixed...but it would be so much easier to obtain an XP disk and repair the installation.

-Mike

 

[sPlAtOiD]

Yep you need the cd rom disk to run a boot repair.