[wburrough]

my computer had been giving me many problems, so i finally decided to reformat it. My main hard drive that i run windows off of is an SATA drive hooked to the main sata port. I have a secondary drive which is hooked to the primary ide port on the motherboard. i put my windows cd in and put windows on my SATA drive. everything worked fine. until i realized the secondary drive was labeled as c: and my main drive was labled d. i went into computer management and and it stated that my d: (SATA) was boot and my c: (IDE - secondary) was labled system. What the [bleep]...

formatting my ide hard drive is not an option - i have alot of information on this drive.

i disconnected the power from this drive and tried to start windows

missing ntldr

i tried following the steps to fix that....no go

then i reinstalled windows with just my sata drive in the comp. this worked fine. i went into windows and my system and boot were both the same and labled as c:

but as soon as i plug in my secondary hard drive it takes back over as system....this time it is labled d: and my SATA is C: but it is still not the system drive. i tried to move the files from d to c in the recovery console but i get access denied.

perhaps i can change the boot.ini file to look for the c: as the system and this will work? i am at work and cant try this now. but if anyone can please help me further that would be great. thanks alot.

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Theoretically it is possible to change the system drive from Drive D back to Drive C, but in reality its far easier just to wipe it again rather than attempt to change something that doesn't want to be changed.

Therefore, unplug your IDE drive before you install Windows again onto the SATA drive. Then plug it back in after Windows is installed.
If the system insists on using your IDE drive as a system drive then check the boot order to ensure it isn't trying to boot off of the IDE drive.

Edited by Neil Jones, 22 April 2008 - 04:15 PM.

[Neil Jones]

Theoretically it is possible to change the system drive from Drive D back to Drive C, but in reality its far easier just to wipe it again rather than attempt to change something that doesn't want to be changed.

Therefore, unplug your IDE drive before you install Windows again onto the SATA drive. Then plug it back in after Windows is installed.
If the system insists on using your IDE drive as a system drive then check the boot order to ensure it isn't trying to boot off of the IDE drive.

Edited by Neil Jones, 22 April 2008 - 04:15 PM.

[wburrough]

that is what i did. i pulled the IDE drive out and installed windows without the drive in the comp. everything worked fine and my C: was the boot and the system. But as soon as i plugged the IDE back in it took over as the primary system with the boot still being the SATA. the only difference was that the system was now labled D: instead of C: and the boot was labled C: - - sorry that sounds confusing as [bleep], i know

[Ztruker]

Read through this series of posts, should/might help: http://forums.cnet.c...ssageID=1307714

[wburrough]

thanks ill see what i can do when i get home tonight.

[wburrough]

ok i have got it working...i think.. I moved the ide hard drive to the secondary primary and set its jumper for the slave position, the cd rom was moved to the primary ide.

i reinstalled windows without the ide hooked up and everything worked fine. i pluged my ide back in after all was said and done and i finally booted and it did not think it was the system. my SATA is the Sytem now!! but... now my "G:" which is the ide is labled as the active drive and it is in the dick 0 space and sata drive is in the disk 1 space in computer management. what does this mean?