Topic awaiting preservation: Dual Boot Problem

Well guys i got this problem

I had a hard disk of partitioned into 2 drives C and D. I was running XP on C

I bought this new hard disk and hook it up as the primary slave. I inserted the Win 2K bootable Cd to format the new hard drive and went off to sleep for a while , woke up to see that it has installed Win 2K on my new hard disk.

when i tried to boot the cpu again it showed me the two options either to run win 2k or XP , but when i select XP it just restarts it self.

In order to make sure that i didnt' format my old hard drive i booted the system from the bootable Cd and found that the old hard hast' been formatted. XP plus all the other stuffs on it were right there.
Tried in many different ways to see if i can boot from my old hard drive (XP one) but didnt' work out.

I can still boot from the new hard using Win 2k. It shows that the C drive ( old hard) exists but cant' access system files on it. Neither can i grab stuffs in my documents and desktop.

For a change i even tried by removing the new hard disk, but to no hope.

Can anyone figure out whats the matter?

For your info here is the list of drives i had before installing the new hard
1- C : (partitioned Old hard - XP ON THIS)
2 - D : (partiioned Old hard)
Plus DVD rom and Burner as E & F

After accidentally installing win 2k on the new hard

1 - C: (partitioned old hard)
2 - D: ( new hard set as primary slave - Win 2K on this)
3 - E : (partiioned old hard ..previosly my D: drive)
Plus DVD rom and Burner as F & G

Please help me out

It seems to me that if you look at the disks using fdisk you will see a difference between the settings for the different partitions. Try changing the C: drive to the primary bootable partition and re-boot. If the machine boots in XP when you do this then you should be able to adjust the partition settings to allow you to boot to either partition from the boot loader.




-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.

Installing the older Win2k while WinXP was installed overwrote the boot record and since 2k is older it did't detect the newer XP and work properly.

You should be able to search for more info with what we told you.

A possible solution below see links

• Windows Knowledge Base article onBoot recovery
• Link to knowledge base so you can search if this doesn't help

__________________________
"Show me a sane person and I will cure him for you."-Carl Jung
Eagles may fly high, but beavers don't get sucked into get engines.
tj333- the semi-Christ

[This message has been edited by tj333 (edited 11-18-2003).]

Cheers for the assistance. I figured out the problem.

Win 2k overwrites XP boot sector files and thats the reason why i wasnt' able to boot from XP.

So what i did was i installed Xp on the new hard (previously Win 2k was installed) so as to repair the damaged boot sector files and bingo!!
it worked out.