XP Pro Problems

C

cheburns

New Member
Ok this is a weird one (at least it seems it to me)... I installed XP Pro. The next day it wouldn't boot without the cd still in. I fixed that by copying two files (ntldr or something like that I'm at work not in front of the machine i should be) from the cd to my d:/ directory (which is my main hard drive where the system is installed). Its a sata drive and I also have an IDE drive which it defaulted as the c:/ drive (weird because it normally wants the os on the c:/ right? but does windows name ide drives before sata or something like that?). I changed the name of the c:/ to the g:/ drive and attempted to change the d:/ (where the os is) to the c:/ but it wouldn't let me. This is all using partition magic 8. Anyways, now it will boot without the cd in the drive, but whenever it does after my ASUS screen and before my Windows screen it simply says 'Invalid boot.ini boot from c:/windows/' but the catch is c:/ isn't the right drive with the windows directory, d:/ is. So is there some way to fix this so it doesn't boot saying there is an error every time or i'm considering just unplugging my ide drive and reinstalling xp so it thinks there is only the one drive and there will be no confusion.

I already had to reinstall once so don't want to do it again any help would be great.

Thanks
 
go into your bios, and change the boot device priority so that the hard drive with your o/s on it is the 1st boot device.
 
I have the bios boot directory set up as follows:

1st: Hard Drive
2nd: Removable
3rd: CD-Rom
4th: Disable

It boots fine but every time it says invalid boot.ini boot from c:/windows/ even when no drive is named as the c:/ drive. Is there a way to tell the boot priority it should be looking for at the d:/ drive or does it even matter?
 
anyone else have any ideas? i just don't want to go through installing xp a 3rd time and getting all the drivers and that nonsense.
 
that's not what heyman was refering to. what you did was made it so that your hard drive has boot-up priority over your cd-rom drive. you don't want it that way. you want it to look like this:

1st: CD-Rom
2nd: Hard Drive
3rd: Removable
4th: Disable

The reason you want your CD-Rom over your HD is in case you ever need to boot up from a CD/DVD for whatever reason.

What Heyman was talking about was changing which hard drive boots up first. What happens is, when you turn your computer on, the BIOS looks at the settings that i just described above and says "I need to look for an OS in the CD-Rom first, and then if I dont find one there, I need to look at the Hard Drive" You need to tell the BIOS which hard drive to look at. Right now it's looking at the wrong one.

And to answer your second question about boot priority and the d:\ drive. It doesn't work like that. Whatever HD you boot up on is then considered to be your C:\ drive, reguardless of what you think it is. I have Vista installed on one HD and XP installed on another. Whenever I want to use one or the other, I switch which HD boots first in the BIOS and when the OS starts, THAT HD that it boots up on is ALWAYS C:\. Hope this helps. If it doesn't, tell us more about your BIOS so we can give step by step instructions.
 
ok I see what you're saying... under boot in bios I go to hard disk drives and there are 2 things:
1. SATA1 : WDC WD4000AAKS
2. 1st Slave: WDC WD2500JB
They are in that order and the sata drive is the one that the os is installed on... and believe it or not the sata drive is named the d:/ drive when i go into my computer or look at it with the partition magic program i use it says its d:/ and the ide drive (that wd2500) was the c:/ but I changed it to be called the g:/. so my system boots but with two messages that shouldn't be appearing and there is no c:/ drive at all... the first is after the asus screen and before windows xp and it says 'invalid boot.ini file booting from c:/windows/' (there is no c:/ drive!!) and the second is after the windows xp but before the login and it says 'xmnt 20002 program not found... skipping autocheck' then it goes to the login screen.

any idea?
 
I think PM is unistalled currently on the machine because I was done playing with the hard drives and was seeing if it was an issue so I'm pretty sure I uninstalled it and that message still comes up but maybe if I reinstall it will go away? I'll see if that helps with the boot.ini when I get home from work.
 
You have two seperate issues. I don't believe PM is causing the problem with the boot.ini file. The boot.ini problem is (i'm assuming) just bad/incorrect boot information because you have the OS on a driver other than C:\. That link gives you step by step instructions on how to fix that. PM is the second problem.
 
Ok so reinstalling PM should fix the one and hopefully going through that process will fix the boot.ini issue. I'll let you know when I take a look at it after work (tgif). Another thing I tried was using partition magic to rename the drives and it said it needed to restart to rename the d:/ (os) to c:/ (which is what it should be right?) and then after restarting, nothing had changed.
 
ok well I went through that website and did what it said... then uninstalled Partition Magic.... both eror messages still show up when I boot up. So I'm just going to open her up tomorrow... unplug my ide drive so that just the 1 sata drive is there and reinstall from scratch and hopefully it all works this time... thanks anyways guys I don't get why this happened.
 
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