Error Loading OS

[__Camouflage__]

I have a dual boot system with Home and Professional on it, and I'm trying to edit a harddrive from another computer. Windows XP Home is my default OS, and that's the HDD I am removing from the computer to be able to edit the HDD from the other computer. I have placed the jumpers correctly, at first they were in Cable Select, then I chose to Master and Slave the drives. But with every configuration I still got the "Error Loading OS" error, so I placed the HDD with Home back in, and slaved the HDD with my Professional to see if the disk had been messed up. Which it wasn't I am using right now. I was wondering if I need to add a "boot.ini" file to my HDD with Professional on it, as I am thinking that the HDD with Home on it has the boot.ini file. I'm confused.

 

[MrCoffee]

your active partition (system partition) which contains vital boot files for all of your windows OS's will be on the partition you first installed XP on... in this case by the sound of it your Home edition partition.

you see your BIOs loads the MBR from the active partition which contains a program with loads NTLDR (from the same partition) which then reads your Boot.ini which contains the ARC paths for your OS installations i.e. the locations of the boot partitions and root directories, NTLDR waits for your OS selection then passes control over to the system files like NTdetect and Ntoskrnl.

In short unless you want to rebuild your entire boot process you need to keep the home edition partition disk in your computer.

have you considered putting this disk you're looking at on the secondary IDE channel with another ribbon?

 

[OutThere]

well, everything stated above is very true, it also depends wether you actually have it as dual boot where both OS run at the same time, or a dual select boot where the OS can be selected at startup. If the later, then you need to rearange your boot, if the former, then you simply have to change the order of your cables and jumpers, though this also depends on weather it is a dell or not, dells act kind of funny with this kind of thing , and I don't know why.