Reclaiming Hard Drive from dual booter

[DanMcGoldrick]

Hello - I am a new user

I have a dual boot Windows XP system running two hard drives - one for Linux and another for Windows XP. I would like to wipe my Linux operating system and claim the other hard drive for Windows XP. I would like to convert to a single boot system with both hard drives available for Windows. I have been through the troubleshooters etc. and can;t seem to figure this out.

Any assistance very much appreciated.
Dan

Get a windows98SE bootdisk from http://bootdisk.org

Boot up off the CD. Change to the designated drive that boots you. Type:

fdisk /mbr

Your boot record is now reclaimed by windows...now wipe out your spare drive by moving over to it and using fdisk and make it into a FAT32 (you can convert it later)...ensure that you wipe clean the mbr from that drive as well just to be sure by repeating the steps above.

Now boot into windows. Windows will autodetect your spare drive since it is now FAT32. Right click on it and choose 'format' and reformat it into NTFS.

You're done now!

If you were talking about RAID, this is a whole other cup of tea and you'll need to get hardware to support this. RAID is installing the same OS across 2 hard disks.

Let me know how things turn out!

TKS

[Haplo]

Hey TKS!

You seem like a guy who might have a solution to my problem wich is similar to the problem DanMcGoldrick has.

I had WinXP installed on an older 80 Gb harddisk, but got a new one recently and installed it as secondary master (IDE1). I installed winXP on the new harddisk, because it's faster and I like gaming :) When installing, windows required a partition on the old harddisk. So I made a 45Gb NTFS partition. Now I wanted to install Fedora Core 3 on the rest of the old harddisk and have a dualboot system using GRUB. For some reason I could not make root, /boot and swap partitions on the remaining space of the old harddisk. So I formatted the whole thing during the FC3 installation and placed FC3 on the first 30 Gb of the old harddisk, told it to use GRUB for dual boot and restarted. It didn't work. I could boot FC3 but not windows. I suppose that I accidently deleted the windows bootloader when formatting the old harddisk :(
So my question (finally;) is: How do I restore that? in the same way as the above? Or is the problem/solution something else?
Also if I put the new harddisk in as the primary master (IDE0) something goes wrong when detecting it (I'm not near my pc right now so I cannot check exactly what it says, but I have to press F1 to continue, and then it cannot find anything to boot from).

Cheers!
Haplo:)

[Thong_Ispector]

fdisk /mbr will fix the problem but NTFS in my opinion is over-rated.

Fat32 works just fine with XP and WHEN there is a problem (not if) there are many more tools to fix and recover your information...

What Linux version were you using and why are you removing it?

[Haplo]

... there are many more tools to fix and recover your information...

What Linux version were you using and why are you removing it?

What tools for example?

Actually what I really want to do, is to have the windows bootloader on the new harddisk, the new hard disk on IDE0 (primary master), the old hard disk on IDE1 (secondary master), and Fedora Core 3 on the old harddisk. I want to use GRUB for dualbooting. If I'm usig Grub for dual booting do I still need the windows bootloader on the new harddisk?

Only thing I cannot do myself right now is get windows to boot, and get the new harddisk to boot from IDE0.

[Bad Karma[CORE]]

Yepp, the windows bootloader will still be needed, no way around that.

Would do the following:

IDE0 new harddisk
IDE1 old harddisk

Install Windows on the new harddisk, once done installing install FC3 on the old harddisk. GRub will pickup the windows installation and add it to the boot menu.

[Haplo]

... Install Windows on the new harddisk...

The thing is that windows is allready installed on the new harddrive, but I have destroyed the bootloader for it, and I would like to get the bootloader on that drive, without reinstalling windows. Is that possible?
I don't want to reinstall windows because I've installed a lot of stuff and done a lot of tweaks on that particular installation that I would rather not have to do all over again.

Thanks for helping :)

[Haplo]

Hi!

Now I can boot the allready installed xp on the new harddisk from IDE0. The trouble with not being able to boot the new harddisk from IDE0 was a bios setting: under the auto-detect hdd... I had made wrong custom settings - I set it to auto, and now I'm able to boot.
But I have to use an XP-boot disk, else it says "Ntldr is missing". So I guess I should boot from the win98-floppydisk now and write "fdisk /mbr"?

Later
-Haplo:)

[Haplo]

Ok!

First of all using the win98 bootdisk and fdisk /mbr did not work for me. Instead of getting the "ntldr missing error" I got the "operating system missing" error.

I've found out that there can be all sorts of reasons to why one cannot boot, so if you've come to this forum looking for help, here's my list of what to do (note that your problem might get solved after any of the steps listed, if one doesn't work, try the next):

Check your Bios: wrong settings for your disk drives might cause boot errors, usually the auto detect feature works fine (Bios->aotu detect hdd -> set everything on auto)

To check that your windows XP installation is ok, and rule out some major disk error, get a windows xp bootdisk (http://bootdisk.com). It will find and boot windows xp, no matter what harddisk/partition it's on.

get a win98bootdisk and follow these instructions to make sure that the partition with XP is the active one:
http://www.jsifaq.com/SUBK/tip5100/rh5185.htm

boot with your XP-cd. Type r for repair at the first menu. For your sake I hope that you remember your admin password. If not, maybe you don't have one so just press enter when promted for it. When at the command promt type this (D: is my cd-rom drive letter, and C: is the drive containing my windows xp - it might be different on your computer.) :

copy D:\i386\ntldr C:\
copy D:\i386\ntdetect.com C:\
fixboot

reboot your pc. If this doesn't work it might be your boot.ini that's corrupted. Reboot with the xp-cd again, type r for repair and when at the command promt, stuff in your xpbootdisk and copy the boot.ini to your xp root (c:\ usually) :

copy a:\boot.ini c:\

reboot your pc. If this doesn't work reboot with the xp-cd again, type r, and at the command promt - at your own risk! (it worked for me) - type:

fixmbr

and reboot again.

That's all. If this does not work for you then I cannot help you. Good luck finding a solution :)