Remove IDE boot and boot from RAID

igeorge

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Apr 12, 2009
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I have a computer which initialy booted from C: . Then it crashed and i installed Win XP pro on D:. Later i added a Raid 1 and installed on it XP pro again- the letter is H. Under computer, manage, disk management i have c: = Boot, D = System and H is just healty with no status. The boot.ini and ntldr are on drive D only.
I WISH that i can make H the boot , because it is a raid 1 , then later on i will remove the disk 1 which is C and D.
The raid is Sata , and the old C&D is IDE 3 years old.
An Interesting question is also , is that i believe the Raid or H or the two hard drives , do not have a boot sector on them.
On the recovery console i tried to fix the MBR, and the only one listed was for disk one C&D, and disk two was not there.
I have too much on the H to reinstall windows and programs again in one single drive in computer and then to make a raid by adding an extra disk.

Boot.ini:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional Drive H" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional Drive D" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT="Microsoft Windows Recovery Console" /cmdcons
Can you help please ?
Thank you
Ion
 
You have created a huge mess here my friend.
Windows MUST be installed on drive C. If you install it anywhere else, you create a whole basket full problems. If you install Windows to another drive, while a drive in your system already has Windows on it, this is what happens. You get workable copy of Windows, but the boot sector stays with the original version. Meaning if you remove any of your drives that had the origianl version of Windows, Windows will now be unbootable. This is why we say when you install Windows, unhook all the other drives first, install, reattach the old drives.
You need to save everything you want to a drive somewhere, unhook all your drives but 1 (or the array if that is where you want to install windows) and start all over.
 
G

Guest

Guest
Another thing to remember. If you don't have floppy installed, you cannot install Windows on RAID. Windows XP needs drivers for raid, and only method to load them is to press F6 at the very beginning of boot from CD, and they will accept drivers from FLOPPY ONLY. Other way around is to slipstream drivers into Windows CD, it is easily done vith program nLite. Windows Vista and Windows 7 accept drivers from whatever media: CD, USB stick, dunno if from memory card.
 
G

Guest

Guest
Try to disconnect all drives but RAID, and try fixboot and fixmbr. if that fails, repair installation. Remember, you need to have drivers for mass storage (RAID) prepared on floppy for XP.