Wierd and tricky XP problem
 

While trying to install a demo last week I had a nasty problem happen to me. The machine basically fell over and died - not even task manager would open. I mucked around for a while and eventually ended up trying to repair windows. Not much luck there and reinstalling didn't work so I went and bought a new HDD thinking that might fix the problem. I bought new RAM as well at the same time as I'd been meaning to buy another gig of ram and a new HDD for a while.

New RAM and HDD went in and I formatted the new HDD and installed windows onto it. At that point I realised one serious issue - I had been trying to repair a SP2 Windows system by reinstalling with an SP1 disc (doh!). My new HDD was 320gig but of course I could only get a 130gig partition using my windows disc.

I went on and reinstalled windows, wacked on SP2 and downloaded security updates etc. Today I decided to stop trying to repair the old install and just go with my new one. I left the 130gig partition on the new drive (E: ) and formatted the rest of it in a separate partition (F: ). Intending E: to be the system partition, and F: for program files etc, I tried to format the old 200 gig HDD (C: ) to use for data/files and noticed in Disc Manager that while E: was apparently what I was booting from, C: was the system. Obviously my attempt to format it failed.

I went into the BIOS and swapped the boot order of the drives around, noticing that the older 200gig drive was first in the queue. When I put the new 320gig drive (E: & F: ) first, I got a NTLDR is missing error. I can see from other threads on this board how to fix that, but I'm concerned that this will result in me losing material that has reinstalled onto the C: drive. When I boot up I also get an option of 2 different systems. I always choose the top one. The bottom one used to result in me getting the corrupt file messages that I as getting before I put in the new HDD, but now I just get a blank screen.

I'm not sure why C: is still the system and to be honest I'm not sure it actually is. My documents etc are on the E: drive (if I go into My Documents through the explorer and make a new folder it shows up on E: ).

So far I've lost no data or anything and now the machine basically works but I want to sort this out.

Any advice?

I posted thsi on another forum as well and the suggestion was that I should copy ntldr from C: to E:. Sounded like a good idea, but of course, there is no ntldr on the C:, but there is one on the E:. Very curious...

The reason you have that problem is that when you installed Windows XP, it saw your 200GB drive as the boot drive, so it put the boot files on the boot sector of that drive. Now when you try to boot, there are no boot files on your 320GB drive, so it moves on to the next in the boot order, your 200GB drive, but when it tries to go to HDD1, it's going to the 200GB instead of the 320GB drive, which is no longer HDD1 but HDD0.

Thnaks. Why did it recognise the 200GB drive as the boot drive and how do I change this?

Wow...this is an old thread. I was about to suggest a fix, but if it's not fixed by now, I'm sure it's been given up on.