Fixmbr

hermeslyre

hermeslyre

VIP Member
Got two HDD's, XP on both, dual booting. Both work fine with the secondary as primary boot but pulling out the secondary drive, or even changing boot priority to the primary drive/OS, results in an OS load error. Okay, I'm not dumb I figure it has something to do with the boot loader, the secondary was installed upon last, maybe it messed up the primarys MBR (however that would happen >_>).

When I enter fixmbr in the recov console, it gives me some tripe about possible, irreparable damage if drive doesn't have a MBR problem, just checking with yous guys to get confirmation; this is an MBR problem? fixmbr/fixboot should solve this?

Thanks!
 
"error loading OS"

To clarify the secondary drive is boot priority, but per dual boot, the primary drive holds the primary OS; The secondary is being thought of to be removed in place of a linux distro. Don't even want to try till I get this figured out.

Thanks Cromewell.
 
You have two XP partitions on one hard drive, or two hard drives with XP on each?
 
The latter. It's a useless setup, I did it quite awhile ago in a noob phase.

And this is why I'm not exactly sure it's an mbr problem. I can understand how two OS' on one drive would result in this, the last installed OS would overright sector#0/MBR. But in this case I dunno.
 
From my experience, running the fixmbr/fixboot commands have never trashed an installation or caused any damage to the partition table, or whatever. I'd say run the commands on the primary drive, but you may want to wait for Cromwell's advice. :P
 
That's why I called it tripe. :D

Ah, screw it. I'll try it, If it kills my install -- I'm blaming you and Cromewell! :mad:

That's being mean.. I'll just blame mep.
 
Alright, tried it and and all it accomplished was a new error message "disk boot failure. insert system disk and press enter" lol. Played around with the bios, nothing changed. I thought mayhaps the drive WAS unbootable now, but upon sticking the secondary back in, worked as if nothing has changed.

I might try fixboot in alittle while...
 
I forgot to mention, secondary drive is PATA, primary is SATA.

This might actually have something to do with it, I dunno.
 
It shouldn't matter what drive type you have.

Try fixboot and if that doesn't help, bootcfg /scan
 
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