I have a dual boot system. I have 2 IDE Hard Drives and can go into the BIOS and choose to boot to a Windows XP Installation on the C Drive (40 GB Seagate) , and a Windows XP Installation on the D Drive (120 GB Maxtor). I normally boot to the D Drive Windows (C Drive used for emergency if anything goes wro ng). Normally, on the D Drive Windows XP the lager drive is the D Drive. When I booted up this morning, for some reason, the Drives were swapped over (Windows still running as normal). Is this something to do with the Boot.ini file. Here is my boot.ini

MY CURRENT BOOT FILE

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect

=============================================

BOOT FILE AMENDED BY A SOFTWARE PROGRAMMER MATE


[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition [2]" /fastdetect

Will the ammended file cure the problem?
m.spencer706@btinternet.com

The last line of your mate's boot.ini has one error. It should read:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition [2]" /fastdetect

instead of:

multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition [2]" /fastdetect

(For boot.ini paths beginning with the "multi" syntax, "disk()" is always set to 0)

Will the boot.ini modification cure the drive lettering problem? Maybe, but maybe not. What it will do is remove the need for you to go into the BIOS and muck with the drive order each time you boot. This will make it much less likely that the drive order problem will crop up in the future.

Here's whay you should do to try to sort things out:

1. Go into the BIOS setup and verify that the BIOS lists the drives correctly in terms of their Master/Slave assignments on the Primary/Secondary IDE channels. If necessary, check the physical Master/Slave jumpers on the drives themselves.

2. In the BIOS, configure the boot order such that the drive that you want to appear in Windows as "C:" is set as the hard drive from which to boot.

3. Boot into the version of Windows on the "C:" drive.Once the system has booted, verify that Windows is recognizing the correct ordering of the drives:

* Right-click on your My Computer icon and choose "Manage" from the resulting menu.
* In the Computer Management windows, click on Storage->Disk Management.
* Look in the right-hand pane of the Disk Management window. Disk 0 should contain the "C:" partition, and
Disk 1 should contain the D: partition. Let us know if that is not the case.

4. Because both the C: and D: drives/partitions are bootable, they most likely each have their own boot.ini file. The boot.ini file that you want to modify is the version living on C: