XP will not boot and asks for CD.

[muddergoose]

I have two hard drives in my computer. Windows XP will start fine when in this configuration. If I remove the HD with W98 installed and go off the XP installed hard drive alone the POST goes incredibly slow then asks to boot from the CD/DVD.

I have tried restore on the cd and fix mbr but It doesn't seem to work. The boot.ini file may have a problem.

Can anyone make a suggestion?

[Jamongris]

Apart from the obvious one of don't remove the second hard drive it could be to do with the jumpers on the back. Some hard drives need to be set as the single drive, it could be that yours is currently set as a master drive.

If you remove the drive, the various configurations should be printed on it somewhere.

[Shunter]

If it doesn't even try to boot from the 2nd hard disc, are you sure your PC is capable of doing so? Older machines tended to only be capable of booting from the primary master hard disc. As such you may need to do as mentioned, make sure the XP drive is connected to the primary IDE channel and that the jumpers are set to master. It's quite possible that if you had a 98 machine originally that when you installed XP it put the boot loader components on the 98 hard drive.

Once you've done that, boot from the CD, recovery console and..

fixmbr (which you know about, but also...)
fixboot (and)
bootcfg /rebuild (which will fix your boot.ini file)

Alternatively, there's nothing wrong with Windows that a large hammer and/or Linux CD can't fix

[muddergoose]

Well...the computer is core 2 duo 2.6 . I kept the old W98 because it had information that could come in handy. I purchased a larger HD with the intention of copying W98 onto a partition of the larger drive. I only have 1 IDE connection on the M/B and all HD's are IDE.

I will look at the jumper on the back but it does come up as xp Master and w98 slave in the POST readout.

[Shunter]

Well if the post says that, then fine. Could still be down to XP having installed some of the bootloader on the second drive. Remove the 98 drive and run the above commands and it'll sort the majority of boot issues out.

[muddergoose]

How stupid can one be?

Jamongris

Such a simple suggestion... but it worked.

Thanks to you and Shunter for offering assistance.

Mudder

[Jamongris]

My pleasure

Had a similar problem once, and after hours of barking up the wrong tree tried the jumpers on the off chance....

[cdtaylor_nats]

Go into the BIOS and check the order of boot settings. Try moving the disk with XP to first if its not already.