PCTech Forums

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO A FRIEND OF MY SONS HOOKED 2 HARD DRIVES I HAD INTO MY COMPUTER. 1 HAS MORE SPACE THAN THE OTHER. DRICE C IS ALMOST FULL AND THE SPACE GETS CRITICAL AT TIMES. I HAVE TRIED TO SWITCH THEM WHERE I AM USING THE DRIVE D BUT IT ALWAYS GIVES ME THE FULL ONE NO MATTER HOW I HOOK THEM UP. I TRIED TAKING THE FULL ONE OUT THINKING IT WOULD REVERT TO THE OTHER BUT THE COMPUTER WILL NOT COME ON WITH ONLY 1 OF THE HARD DRIVES. NO MATTER WHICH 1 I TAKE OUT. I THINK HE WENT TO MS DOS AND SET THIS UP BUT I AM NOT THAT COMPUTER LITERATE AND DON'T KNOW HOW TO UNDO IT.

what version of windows are you running because im not understanding where DOS is coming in. Unless your running 2 drives in a raid array you shouldnt have a problem scaling down to 1.

If you unhook the D drive from the machine, leaving C drive connected, can you boot?

at the time the 2 hard drives were connected i had windows 98. i now have xp.. i do not know for sure about the ms dos thing. i do know when the guy did it he was in a part that i know nothing about or know how to get there. it doesn't matter which hard drive i take out i cannot boot up without both. i have tried with either one and tried different positions on the harness. all i know is without both drives hooked up, i cannot boot up.

Based on your and what I've read here,
It sounds to me like you have windows 98 installed on one drive and windows xp on the other.

One of the drives has a Master boot record that contains the boot information for both drives.
It is what gives you the boot selection window that you eliminated in your

If you remove either drive then the master boot record cannot find the other drive or there is no master boot record found, both would cause the system to not boot.

There is a way to remedy this but it would be considered for advanced users only and you would need a windows xp cd.
You would also need to know physically what OS is on what drive.

i checked both drives and don't see that one is any different than the other. they both look like xp to me. i checked the properties on each one and see no difference except one is location 0 and the other's location is 1..
i do have the xp disc.

[Boot Loader]
timeout=3
Default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[Operating Systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
C:\="Microsoft Windows 98"

This is what i got..

SALINAS4U,

Your boot.ini file does not really tell me everything but it doesn't look to good.
The terms "rdisk(0)", "partition(1)" is the first partition on the first drive in the computer. If there are two partitions, partition C is partition(1) and partition D is partition(2).
As you can see windows xp is on partition (1) witch should be your C:\ drive but the dos call for windows 98 is C:\ also.

Lets try a different approach:
Start > Control panel > Administration tools > Computer management, on the left side click "Disk Management".
Now on the right side you will see Disk 0 and Disk 1, please tell me what letter is assigned to each Disk.
Also tell me if there is more than one partition on each Disk (they would be labeled with letters)

it shows that drive c is disc 0 and that d is 1. it also says drive c under STATUS is HEALTHY (SYSTEM) and d is HEALTHY (ACTIVE) under the layout tab, they both say PARTITION. no numbers or anything.