Help swaping HDs IDs and contents

Here is the quick and dirty

Old 120 GB C:. XP/NIS formated twice. In a Dell 4550. It is bloated with Norton and other stuff. Only use 40GB of space.

Decided to get new HD, do clean install, and use for boot disk, wipe my old C: and use solely for backups and images.

I plug in new 160 GB HD, desgnated as D:, do XP install from scratch. Went with NOD32/ZA/TI10. Get everything the way I want and copy my files over from C:. Can boot either HD. Decide everything is good on D:, go to format C:, but XP won't let me. Change jumpers, try a few things, but my BIOS will only boot from C:

Will it only boot from C: cause that is the only bootable HD? C: has a FAT32 partition on it, but my D: does not. I don't know if that is important or not. I don't get it. I formated and installed from scratch to my D: Why won't my BIOS boot from it when I set it as master?

Now I am confused what to do. I would rather not do a complete install again. I have a pristine updated install on D:. I need to move that somewhere. Wipe my D:, remove both HDs and install my new one as C: and move my clean install back to it. Is that possible? What have I missed? Am I making this too complicated?

I have the Seagate disk wizard software too, but didn't use it to set up my new drive as my boot drive. Can I just use that? Any help is most appriciated.

 

it boots to C because thats the system partition and that drive has the Master boot record.

disconnect C
insert Install CD
do a repair install

http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_xp.htm

alternately FIXMBR, install ntldr and a boot.ini (which is all its really missing the bootstrap codes

 

The only reason I didn't go through the stuff with my disk wizard is that I don't care if my boot drive is D:. The guy at the store said it didn't matter if it didn't matter to me.

So I unplug my C: leaving D: there. Insert XP cd and boot.
go to console, select the D: XP, do the stuff that was said. Copy files, fixmbr, and so on, then I should be able to boot to D: and when I go into BIOS it will be displaying "boot hard disk D:". Set my jumpers for D: master and C: slave, then I can plug my C: back in and wipe it?

Why wasn't a boot partition made when I installed XP on D:? So I am just missing something right? I didn't setup my stuff right. It didn't make sense that I had to only boot from C:. Thanks for your help. I'm just down the road from you in the Springs.

 

I have a question can power_man simply unplg the "C" drive and plug the cable into the "D" drive, making it "C".

 

I know right now I can't do that. The drive has been written as D: so even if it wanted to be C:, all the paths would be screwed up.

I have a huge XP book. Been reading about boot partitions, but I'm a little unclear about what all I have to do. Will the boot partition be made by using those commands mentioned, or is it something separate I have to do. Will be reading up at work tonight and I have searched Google. Any guidance is most appreciated.

I am thankful that someone chimed in. I really thought it sounded screwy that my BIOS would only boot from C: and that I was going to have to move everything around. Thanks for setting me straight

 

one HDD one letter
edit > (assuming one partition on the drive)

the drive formerly known as D, which we will now call Phyllis
will suddenly bloom like a wildflower after a long winter with the removal of her evil twin sister the drive formerly known as C which we will now call Brunhilda (sfx frightened horses). Phyllis will become the Belle of the ball and be crowned C:

Windows dynamically assigns drive letters based on both the boot order selected in the BIOS and their physical configuration on the UDMA capable channels (IDE\SATA\PCI-SCSI-ECT) and follows a set scan order further modified by the type of partition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment
http://www.dewassoc.com/support/win2000/driveletters.htm

 

Ice, you're the bomb! I get off work tomorrow morning and will get this taken care of this week. Thanks a ton for helping me out. So riddle me this. Why would I want to have a dual boot system? The only reason I have one now was because the wife gets pissed at me everytime I screw with the computer. IT is very unappriciated in my house. I wanted to build my D: at my lisure and still have my computer running for the family. What I wanted in the end was for my new drive to be my boot, and my old drive to only be storage and images.

So I could have dual boot and have another layer of protection, but then my family would have to make a decision at startup. (How terrible) I have a combined total of 280GB and when I started this I only had 40GB on my C: so space is not a problem.

On the other hand, this is a simple home computer. We e-mail and surf and do school work and a little D3 and HL. I don't do anything major. Oh crap. I just realized I could have a stripped down install to play games on. I wonder if they would run better?

So all I have to do is lift Phyllis's skirt and fix the boot partition and not worry about dual boot, or do as you sugested with Phyllis and Brunhilda and use my clean XP install to run a game install on C:

Question: I made a backup/copy of my clean updated XP install with all drivers when I built Phyllis with TI10. When I get her running, can I lobotamize Brunhilda and restore the clean XP to her, or can I not do that because it is a backup to a different drive.

Merry Christmas by the way.

 

There are three great advantages to a dual boot


1. repair,
its generally simpler for someone to look sideways at a malfunctioning OS from a parallel install than to boot into the recovery console and fix it from a command prompt. I had my workstation corrupt the registry just the other day (WINNT\System32\config\Software its listed total was 0 bytes after a CHKDSK) I have an ap that backups the registry at every boot (an old Beta now obscenely expensive) but a simple .bat file could do the same thing, since the last known good copy (WINNT(WINDOWS)\repair) gets over written at every boot, allows you to roll back to previous registry states. Or you can run data recovery software for the functional OS to a really borked install. Ect.

2. security
a parallel install is a reasonably more secure way to scan a suspected install, since its drivers, kernel, aps & data in general are far more likely to be "clean" and any malware is expecting to bootstrap its way into function (on a reboot) from the OS we are going to scan by again looking sideways at it.

3. special use
like you have already gathered, by installing just a few dedicated aps to an install, you gain some simplicity and avoid potential conflicts, I almost always have a rescue 2nd install with data recovery and security scanners, but have also setup dedicated graphics workstations, lab & control engineering boxes. These days I generally don't bother much will dual boot (with the same OS, I do W2K \ Linux still) becuase I actually have dedicated computers (Tyan K8W workstation for graphics) old celeron for control, P4 surf and media.

point here is though a true "dual boot" is just a convenience, you can of course just add a OS installed HDD from a different box and look at it sideways for repair or security, you just can't boot to it as it has the wrong drivers.

But if you have just one computer and 6GB of space to spare its damn convenient. And without it your unlikely to be doing that many remote security scan across installs unless your networking.

Learning about BIOS scan orders, physical disk configuration, how a computer bootstraps, the OS assigns letters and understanding disk management are really just the basic skills you pickup as you grow. Once youve got the basics down your able to apply a little deduction to quickly get to the root of any future issues when building or simply swaping drives around.

you have any issues post back

as far as optimizing your drives and partitions to how your using them and for performance and security
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=159101
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=905157&postcount=8
it depends on your use more than someones recommendations, and requires a little thought and generally a little experimentation
I personally seperate the OS and applications from the data so it easy to image or restore the OS+aps at the first hint of trouble and not loose any data, of course that means forwarding data from default application storage areas to folders on the data partition (bookmarks, email, if you employ my documents ect)

boot order (BIOS) alot of the same stuff as above
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=158776

I could see how youd have a few drives each with a bootable OS one for gaming and security scans, one the famlily daily driver. but then I also see how you could have separate data partitions and a recovery image of the installs (in the optimizing tutorial, it talks about what portions of a HDD are best for performance and how some data that is rarely accessed or rarely accessed nonsequentially suffers not all all from the lower performance, allowing the higher performance areas to be employed for demanding aps, the OS and virtual memory (almost always nonsequential disk accesses where the arm is constantly moving from track to track sector to sector and your paying the penalty with greater latency.)

 

So let me see if I have this right. I have also changed my mind. I now want two bootable installs, one on each drive. My new 160GB HDD will be forever known as Phyllis. (currently D her evil twin sister is Brunhilda. She is a slim old lady of 120GB. (Currently C

Open the castle and banish Brunhilda from the Kingdom. For gigles plug Phyllis into master on the cable. (When I boot, Phyillis will now be designated c: RIGHT?)
Boot from cd, enter Recovery console, select XP install to repair.
at prompt- COPY (my cd):\i386\NTLDR C: - COPY X:\i386\NTDETECT.COM C:
at prompt- FIXBOOT C:
at prompt- FIXMBR C:

I now have a bootable HDD labled c:. Her name is Phillis and to those that love her in the Castle her informatin will be called "Family"

Only now do we allow Brunhilda back into the Kingdom. She will now hold position of slave. When bios examines, it will label her D: and should display both HDD in bios in the boot order RIGHT?

I want to labotomize Brunhilda (just because I can) When she is all cleaned up, I reinstall XP, it probably won't install a boot sector right, but I can do so at this time using the above steps.

Can I restore my TI10 backup of my clean XP install from Phyllis to Brunhilda, or do I have to reinstall XP. It is just XP with all updates and drivers.

Once Brunhilda is dressed in plain XP, you can help me edit my boot.ini files so that cross booting is possible and to lable my installations as "Family" for Phyllis, and Brunhilda will be my play toy and I will label that install "Kevin's games"

The only question left is how do I need to set up my security? I should install TI10, Reg Mech, on both. How should I install Zone alarm, NOD32, and Spy Sweeper. Does it need to be on both or should I just put on one and scan the other. If I leave everything off games it should run faster.

Please edit the above as you see fit. I swear to God, if I scream Phyllis in the middle of the night you are in big trouble!

 

Right, alternately you can just do a repair install without the manual steps (starts on the 12th capture screen)
the CDROM has to be higher in the boot order than the single HDD of course. Since its already a brand new install your fixing, thats probably the easiest approach.

My actual recommendation is to place one HDD on the same channel with the CDROM (as slave or master) and the other on its own channel, makes transfering data inbetween drive far faster.

BIOS labels drives 0, 1, 2, ect (some BIOS start with 1 instead of 0) and it finds them based on their physical location, the Master on the Primary IDE channel would be seen first, then the Master on the Secondary Channel, then the slave primary then slave secondary, then PCI cards (SCSI ect) USB.
Some BIOS have switches that place USB or SATA higher in the defualt scan order. So might take a bit to determine exactly which drives are getting which number if they are involved, but generally in the boot order and in the BIOS drives section what they are is listed.

In short you boot to a drive, start diskmgmt.msc and see which sister is listed as a system partition. Then your positive that the drive listed in the boot order (say HDD 0 ) matches to that sister, then switch the boot order and confirm the other sister.

Its the OS that assigns letters and by default (meaning no permanently assigned drive letter or other shenanigans), the OS install actually booted from gets assigned C:
Notice I said from not to, you can boot from C: Phyllis and to D: Brunhilda for example with Phyllis the HDD 0 and first in the boot order but Brunhilda selected from Phyllis's boot.ini, or set the BIOS to HDD 1 first (Brunhilda) to boot from and to and she will be C: the system partition, or leaving the BIOS order on HDD 1 select the Phyllis entry in Brunhilda's boot.ini and Brunhilda will be C: but youd have booted to Phyllis who is now D: and listed as a {boot} partition in diskmgmt Once you get the hang of it which partition gets which letter actually lets you know which drive it was booted from. Complicated to spell out but soon becomes pedestrian if your switching things around alot.

Id recommend simply disconnecting Phyllis and installing again from scratch. Which would mean neither HDD would have a dual boot boot.ini, we can edit both boot.ini to make both dual boot, or you can simply employ the BIOS boot order to switch to yours when you use it and do nothing.

dont see why not, but here is where I have to say I don't own True Image ;P
never even used it. just an X-moderator of a data storage forum. But most image aps work on the same principles, Im just not familiar with the specifics.
Its also likely you have bundled clone utilities available from the drive manufacturer. (tool you can download) What your after is a straight clone rather than an image (lots of freeware will do a basic clone too.)

The real advantages of True Image I gather are as a backup tool that among its more advanced features can do incremental backups. From inside the OS.

certainly
just verify which sister the boot.ini is from when you post it and we should be able to generate both of them, each will cross boot to the other regardless of which HDD the BIOS points to.

you can always call her John but the wif\GF might be even more upset
I outlined my personal security procedure here
if your install is truely isolated (no networking\internet) you dont even need hotpatches or service pcks, but if its really your playground youd probably want to install the whole shooting match, when its time to play games, you can always pull the LAN and disable unessecary background aps including all the security. But in truth, its the GPU on the graphics card thats doing the vast majority of the work and the CPU itself and onboard RAM isnt typically fully employed, so you might not be seeing that great a performance gain anyway and its alot of bother.


In closing let me recommend the profound security advantages of running a LiveCD like Knoppix (freeware\open source) damn hard to subvert something thats read only on a burned CD, a reboot would cure all. In the event you ever go slumming, also while a little different, the family might be able to adapt to it as well, pretty damn safe commuting, and your kids get to brag they use Linux

 

Sweet, got it. Really, no more questions. I am going to swap drives and channels as suggested. When I play around and see what you mean about booting, I might just leave the boot.ini separated. (Not cross booting) At least that way it is just a quick change in BIOS at start up and then the other 95% of the time nobody will have to deal with the boot menu.

I will probably install all protection on both, I'll just turn off when not needed. I game online sometimes, and if I ever get into a problem with the main drive, I can get on line for help or downloads. Thanks again. I'll let you know how it turns out. Merry Christmas.

 

well with two functional installs you can select from the BIOS
Id at least start to play around with editing the boot.ini on the other drive from the one your booted into. Just for the learning experience

you can always change it back

next thing you might consider would be setting NTFS permissions so the young ones can't accidentally modify (or even read) anything in your playground. But you can admin (and scan) that install from yours.

http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Understanding-Windows-NTFS-Permissions.html


happy holidays