invalid boot.ini

[deadsheep]

so, i has an asus a8n amd sli motherboard. i have a secondary 640 wd sata drive that i had on the last time i installed windows on the master drive. i then unhooked my secondary and reformatted my computer. after that i hooked up my secondary again and when windows tries to boot it says "invalid boot.ini booting from c:\" and then it boots up fine. (may be in my head, but things seem a bit slower now, like its needing to procerss more.)
so i figured i did something wrong and it was trying to boot from the secondary so i unhooked the secondary again and turned on the comp once more, and it still says the invalid boot.ini thing. not sure what i should do.

 

[deadsheep]

did i not make sense?> anyone have and suggestions?

 

[GhislainG]

Where is Windows installed and what's the contents of your boot.ini file?

 

[deadsheep]

wondows is installed on my c drive. nothing is on the secondary. there was nothing on my boot ini file...probably the issue but dont know what to put in it.

 

[jitpublisher]

If you had Windows on 1 drive, left it in the system, and then installed Windows on a 2nd drive while the first drive is still hooked up, this can happen. When you install to a new drive, make sure you take the old drive out first, or at least unhook it.
It's like it does the new installation, however since there is a valid boot file already there on another drive, it just uses it. It's weird, but I have had the same problem. After I did a fresh install on a new drive, and leaving my old drive in with Windows on it, I had to leave the old drive in or Windows would not boot....on my new drive. If I unhooked the old drive, same problem you are having....no boot. So I ended up doing a completely new install again with only 1 drive in the system to finally fix it once and for all.

 

[deadsheep]

the secondary drive was not in when i installed windows. windows is not installed on it either. this happened when i was trying to install the drive.

 

[dokk2]

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect .....

this is what a boot.ini should look like for installation on/with one hdd..
having one or more hdd's attached to the system should not make any difference as windoze will always look for "the active partition" on the primary hdd,,if it finds one on another hdd/partition,it is a matter of "first come first served",unless of course,,you are using a boot manager..

 

[deadsheep]

nope, i think that fixed the issue. thanks guys. especially you dokk

 

[deadsheep]

now more prolems now everytime the drive is in it makes my catalyst control center (ati gpu program) crap out on me and it asks whether i want to boot from windows(default) or windows xp professional which ive never installed on anything.

 

[bobbknight]

Repair install

 

[GhislainG]

The last line in boot.ini contains "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn"? dokk2's sample is fine, but the dots shouldn't be there.