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SoonerObsession
10/5/2006, 07:50 PM
About 2 years ago I installed Mandrake on a spare hard drive just to tinker around with. When I start my computer I have a boot option screen that asks what operating system I want to use. My default is Windows XP, but I am wanting to remove the hard drive from my machine to put on another. How do I change the boot loader to boot straight to my windows xp hard drive?
Ike
10/5/2006, 07:56 PM
which HD is the bootable HD? if its not the XP one, this can be trouble.


You might look at instead of swapping out hard drives, installing an extra controller card and hooking the new one up to that.
SoonerObsession
10/5/2006, 08:03 PM
It's the Mandrake one.
Ike
10/5/2006, 08:17 PM
yeah...see that will make it tougher.


so...followup question. when you made the machine dual boot, was the XP hard disk bootable? Did you ever clean the MBR of that disk?
SoonerObsession
10/5/2006, 08:21 PM
I added Mandrake after already having XP on my system. I'm pretty sure since I installed Mandrake on the other hard drive that the MBR is still intact on hard drive 1.
Ike
10/5/2006, 08:24 PM
so I'd recommend testing it by removing the mandrake HD, hooking the XP HD up to the IDE master slot, and booting up. If windows comes right up, then you are probably just fine. If it doesn't however....I'm not sure...re-install?
yermom
10/5/2006, 08:27 PM
maybe just a repair from the recovery console on the setup disk?

i haven't had to fix this recently, with Win9x you could just run fdisk /mbr
SoonerObsession
10/5/2006, 08:29 PM
Here's a screen shot from config sys...
http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e72/tandkwelch/bootiniscreenshot.jpg
I don't know if this helps or not.
Ike
10/5/2006, 08:32 PM
yeah, I haven't had to do anything like this since I had RH7 and w98 dual booted...are you using a linuxy bootloader or the NT bootloader?
SoonerObsession
10/5/2006, 08:33 PM
It's Lilo (linux)
SoonerObsession
10/5/2006, 08:34 PM
I have Partition Magic. I wonder if it has the capability of switching the MBR back to Windows XP.
Vaevictis
10/5/2006, 08:41 PM
If necessary, it should be possible to install LILO on the second disk and have it boot straight into Windows.
SoonerObsession
10/5/2006, 08:47 PM
I appreciate everyone's help. I'll let you know when I have a chance to mess with it how it turned out.
SoonerObsession
10/6/2006, 12:07 PM
Well, I tried disconnecting the drive number 2 (Mandrake) and that did not work. Evidently the MBR is on that drive and it is not on hard drive number 1 (Windows XP). I tried messing with Partition Magic 8.0 and I about lost everything. Luckily I was able to reinstall Mandrake on hard drive number 2 and it allowed me to boot to the drive I want to. I would really like to remove this drive and not have to mess with a bootloader but evidently it's not worth the possibility of losing my windows drive. I will eventually reformat everything after getting some things backed up, but that's practicly an all day event that I'm not ready for yet.
SoonerObsession
10/7/2006, 12:01 AM
I've decided I want to reformat everything. But I need to back up my wife's Microsoft Word Profile. She does transcription on this computer and has many auto corrects and dictionary saves that need to be kept. How dow I find these files and what do I do when I'm ready to install them in Word preferences again? I've read the help notes on this, but I'm still not sure what to do.