[jsilburt]

Ok heres the problem. I am running old pentium 2 Dell machine with windows 98 on it. About 6 months ago I bought a 80gig hard drive. I installed the second hard drive, leaving the orginal 8 gig hard drive as the primary and made the new 80gig drive the slave. I installed windows XP on the 80 gig. When I boot I get a screen that allows me to choose which operating system to use.

Now i want to use the 8 gig drive for a pentium 2 linux machine i am building. The problem is that when I remove the 8 gig drive and make the 80 gig drive the primary it can't find windows. When i boot up the machine it says operating system can not be found. It sees the hard drive. It just can't find windows XP.

how do i fix it so I can use the 80gig as the primary on my old machine

Thanks soo much

 

[dai]

that's because all the boot files are on the original drive
boot into the recovery console and try
fixboot

 

[jsilburt]

What is fixboot? and where can i locate it

 

[dai]

boot from the xp cd and choose install
when the repair option comes up press R
in the recovery console type
fixboot
and press enter

 

[jsilburt]

when i get into the repair console it asks me wich windows installaion would you like to log onto.

how do i choose windows xp?

 

[jsilburt]

letters didn't do anything when trying to select which windows installation i would like to log on to. the only number that does anything is 1. after i type 1 in, it asks me for adminstrator password. is there a default password. or is this the admin account password from windows xp users?

 

[kodi]

If you have not set a password just hit enter and it should continue

 

[jsilburt]

weird. I tried that. no luck. still being blocked by the administrator password. Will it be the same one i have set for administrator user in windows?

 

[jsilburt]

The problem is that we haven't actually set an administrator passowords on this computer at all. We are stumpped on the password. could there be a default password?

 

[linderman]

hello:

if you havent set an admin password then usually leaving it blank and hitting enter does the trick / there is no default password

try removing the 8 gig drive . set the 80 gig as Primary master (jumper pins on drive) and move the drive to the end of the cable all by itself / this is important if the drive is not at the end of the cable then it will give you problems

then enter bios / set boot order to CD first hard drive second boot dont forget to save changes & exit bios / then reboot with win xp CD disk in the cd-rom drive / when the set-up process begins it should take you to the "R" option (repair) then simply hit repair windows xp OS (follow Dai's instructions above) fixboot that repair should load the needed boot files onto your 80 gig drive

let us know how you progress

regards

joe

 

[jsilburt]

I was doing all that. I just can't get past this damn password part. Would it possilbly help if I put the 8 gig back in? We really can't think of what the password might be. If we do the install of windows will it reinstall windows overtop of the old copy of xp with the boot info added this time? Will that distroye any date on the hard drive?

Thanks

 

[Volt-Schwibe]

if you put the 8 back in, all it will do is see the working boot files, and tell you that it "fixed them"

so, then when you pull the 8 back out, you still will have a non working boot.

the thing is, the boot files are all on that 8. the reason for running the fixboot utility id to add them to the 80, making it a bootable installation of xp.

 

[jsilburt]

ok so what are my options at this point. We can't seemed to get by this password block

 

[dai]

if you did not have a password for xp leave it blank.if that does not work try admin

 

[jsilburt]

I am realy stumped. I have tried both of those. plus every other standard password that we use in our house. Anyway around this?

 

[dai]

do a repair install,instead of accepting the first repair option that comes up continue with install
when windows finds the previous installation it will offer the repair

 

[jsilburt]

ok i do that. it takes me to the partition screen. I select use existing partion. Then it takes me to another screen that says a \Windows folder already exists which may contain a windows installation. Continuing may over write the existing windows installation.


should I continue????

 

[dai]

what version of xp is on the drive,is it the same as the disk or have you upgraded by sp 1 or 2 since installing

 

[jsilburt]

its a regular verison of windows xp pro sp 2. So the only upgrades that have been done are the sercurity updates pretty much

 

[dai]

well you would expect it to come up with
windows has found a previous installation,would you like to repair,you are probably seeing the overwrite because it is not on the c partition,if the other drive has been disconnected,it should be ok to overwrite