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Hard drives C D E and IDEs

Join Date: May 2005
Posts: 2,458
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gerbil gerbil is offline Offline
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Re: Hard drives C D E and IDEs

  #5  
May 13th, 2008
Heya, Cristalle, yep, from your second pic I can see that Windows is installed on E: [the "boot" drive], which is a logical partition in an extended partition. Which is fine, but you can only mark a primary partition as Active, and you have done that- D: is Active. D: being the Active partition means it must also contain the boot or loader files [ntldr, ntdetect.com, boot.ini] because .... well, how much do you wish to know..?
Startup: ...this will be a very brief version of the chain of events!..... BIOS whirs, searches for the master boot record on the master disk [your Disk 00]. The MBR's partition table for the whole disk is read, logical partitions in an extended partition are successively investigated and the single, active partition is noted, the mbr code is loaded into memory, and BIOS hands control to that. The mbr code directs operations to the partition marked as active, specifically to its boot sector. All partitions contain the same boot sector code, but only that active partition's boot sector code is loaded; it assumes control and searches for certain files in the root of that partition. If your OS is XP then ntldr will be read into RAM and ntdetect.com will examine your hardware [and either BIOS or Windows will assign resources to them depending on whether you have ACPI].
ntldr will read boot.ini..... an on it goes.

You can check yourself that a logical drive cannot be Active - try to make it active with Disk Mgmt - the option just will not exist. You can see that C: is the System drive -that is where those 2 files plus boot.ini are right now, but BIOS cannot see them because it is not looking at that hard disk, and if it did then the partition is not active, so...
So, yep, copy those two files into D:\, make a boot.ini and copy that in also.
"Well Cookie is the cat, the other two are..." See? I know stuff....
Last edited by gerbil : May 13th, 2008 at 8:55 pm.
Deep, deep in the woods, but walking about.
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