booting from wrong hard drive

[Dario D.]

I'm having a strange problem.

I have 2 hard drives (C and D), and an external. Yesterday, I restored drive C (the main drive where XP is installed) using a Norton Ghost backup saved on the external... but for some reason, now the computer tries to boot from drive D, the 2nd drive.

Windows 98 and 2000 were once on this drive, and it gives me the option to boot to one of those, but fails, because they aren't there anymore.

Any ideas? The funny thing is that sometimes it boots to XP properly, and not drive D. I checked the drives with Norton Disk Recovery, and it says both of them are set to "Prim,Boot".

How do I force the PC to boot using drive C only? I think something may have happened to my Ntldr, or boot.ini, or whichever file it is that controls booting.

 

[Dario D.]

Okay, I just deleted Boot.ini from drive D, and everything's working okay now. Is that the right thing to do, or should I restore it?

After doing some googling, and studying Boot.ini's on other computers here, I got the impression that I only needed one of them; the one on the bootdrive, or the one that points to the proper drive, partition, and windows folder.

 

[bliink]

Check out which drive has boot priority in your BIOS. It may need resetting to C

 

[Dario D.]

Arrrgh! You're right. That's what it was.

For some reason, HDD-0 was separated from all the other HDD's (which were stacked together, a lot further down the list), so when I reset them (in order to boot to the Norton Ghost disk), I set the first boot device to HDD-1 (not HDD-0)

Computers are beautiful things. :hmph: