Question on OS booting.

[Reverend Maynard]

Howdy all. I have Win2k installed on my secondary drive, G. I did this because my C drive is on it's last leg. If I disconnect the C drive though, the Win2k install on G won't boot. I tried copying over the system files and the boot.ini file, but it still won't boot. Is there any good way to make G pull it's head out of it's butt and become C happily, or am I going to need to reinstall?

[VJ]

Have you used the sys-command to transfer systemfiles ?
Perhaps the rescue-disks might be of help ?

Also, you could try to replace the C-drive with a new drive, and make this the bootdrive by using the command "sys c:" (I'm not sure if it will work though)

I remember my NT4 on installed on E: in my previous system (3 harddisks : C D E). When removing the D-drive, NT booted happily from its disk (which now was called D), but most applications didn't adapt to this change very well. So bear in mind that - although W2K might be able to deal with it - installed applications might not...


Personally, I'd think reinstalling W2K is the best way to go (if you intend to have drive-letters shifted around).

Jörg

[Marshmallowman]

you have to add a boot record to the G drive.
..so it can start the boot process.

in win 98 etc, you coulkd do it with

fdisk /mbr

I don't now how its done with win2k, may be possible using the repair console from the win2k cdrom, or rescue disk.

[Reverend Maynard]

See I forgot all about the MBR. I'll give that a go this afternoon, if that doesn't work the Win2k repair is the next step I think.

[lindberg]

Yes, the master boot record is the key here.

But remeber if you have your G: as NTFS you have trouble, because windows wants a fat partition for the mbr.


Heh, I remember one of my friends once installed w2k to e: or whatever it was, he absoulutely wanted the w2k to be c:, he tried a lot of different things with ending up with an re-install of the whole sytem...

Just a thought.

[VJ]

Not entirely true...

Windows 2000 is perfectly capable of running/booting on an all NTFS system. Windows NT was even capable of running/booting on such a system.

The problem occurs when installing NT on a system that has not FAT-partitions : it needs FAT for its temporary files. I'm not sure about W2K however, but booting from an NTFS is no problem (see screenshot, the unknown partitions are a linux partition and a linux swap partition).


Jörg

[Kosh Naranek]

You can also use Partiton Magic to change drive letters without problems.

But as stated fdisk /mbr will do the trick.

Or if you can get a hold of a Win XP CD-ROM you can boot from that and then start the recovery console where there are two commands called FIXBOOT and FIXMBR ( or something like that)

(I don't know if WIN XP can mount W2K .....)