Newbie trying to get rid of old hard drive

Quick rundown: I started the sys. with my old 12 gig HD. Got my new 60 gig WD drive in, and I can not boot without the old one in, I get a NTLDR is missing error. I want to get rid of the old 12 gig drive and run the new one SATA (to get rid of a bulky cable).

I have tried with the new drive as a master, master with slave, and everything!

I think I am making a stupid mistake, can anyone help?

old 12 gig drive is c:, new drive is d:

Right now I have an option to boot in Win ME (old drive) or XP (new drive) at startup.

can anyone help?

Thanks!

E

The XP bootloader (NTLDR) is on the root of the C: drive. In this case, it is the 12 gigabyte drive that you want to get rid of.

You may be able to remove the 12 gig drive, and use the fixboot command in the Recovery Console.

Here is a great site that shows how to get to the Recovery Console, http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_xp.htm .

Or, you may just want to remove the 12 gig, and do a clean install of XP on your SATA drive.

Thanks!!

I got stubborn and kept on trying untill late last night! After a good nights sleep, I did a little searching and had come up with about the same Idea. The original boot file is on C:, not D:.
Thanks for the info!!

E

Problem solved!

I now only have the 60 gig hard drive running, on the SATA Raid thing. I probably went the long way around to get it running, but I am still learning XP. I took out the old 12 gig, re-installed XP, then hooked the drive up with the Seriall adapter that came with the NF7-s, and got the computer to boot up, installed all my drivers again.

Maybe I went for the longer fix, but I am still learning, and it is so nice to get rid of that ribbon cable for the tiny case I have!

E