PCTech Forums

Hey guys,

Here's one for you to think about. I have 2 drives in my machine, 1 IDE and 1 SATA. The IDE is my primary master, making it C: and has XP on it. The SATA is drive E: and also has XP,this is the one i boot from. I no longer use C: and was considering removing it. I cant just pull it out because thats where the bootloader is. If i pull it, i cant boot. Can i make this swap without formating the SATA and starting over?

There are a couple different issues here.

How did you get XP on the SATA drive? I'm guessing that you cloned with ghost and rebooted. If thats the case, you need to run fdisk and make the SATA drive partition active. Rebooting after the clone is a mistake, the second XP drive will not have an active partition. It will not boot.

The other thing, check, the bios some of the SATA drive configurations are a little strange. You might have overlooked one

Having a second drive online during an install is not a good thing.

You should be able to boot with a floppy and run fdisk and set the partition to active.

I think that fdisk will activate a NTFS partition. --I haven't had the situation ever occur (with NTFS), but it should work. Give me some feedback on the outcome.

I'll give it a try and let you know