[RhoDaZZ]

Hey,

In a long time now I've run on the following config with my two HDD's:

1st (Seagate Barracuda 1 TB): Where I have my OS and files

2nd (Western Digital 400 GB): Not used for anything, but planned for a backup drive.

Now... yesterday I decided that it was finally the day to format the old drive, the 2nd one, since I thought the "Choose Operative System" screen on boot was tiring me at last (even though I had already set the counter down to 3 seconds).

This... I've regretted much since.

Anyway, what exactly happened was that I booted the Windows XP Cd, wanted to format the WD drive so I could lose the OS message. I did that and waited till exactly the moment where it started to do the operation "Copying Files", then I held in the power button on my PC until it shut down.

When it booted again (after setting the correct drive in BIOS) it said it was not a correct "Boot unit" and I should insert one or reboot the PC.

I then thought that I might have a chance at installing a one-timer Windows on the WD drive, edit the boot.ini to be correct so I could choose the Seagate drive again as I had before (already at this point I thought, If I get it back to where it was before at least it's much, much better than now).

After Windows had installed I tried to search for some two HDD boot.ini configs on Google, copied them and customized them (though incorrectly, obviously).

That only lead to me having 3 options (Two of which I had written the names of myself and one which was just called "Windows <Normal>"). And I could only choose the first one. On my second try of editing the boot.ini though, none of the options worked and I was on to having the repair console as my only last option. Before that though I tried various things such as:

Switching the SATA cable positions, BIOS configs, format in Vista.



Then I went into repair mode on the XP CD and did the Bootcfg /Rebuild command. When I rebooted it said Hal.dll was missing, but at least it was a step forward compared to saying it was not a proper (boot) unit at all.

I then Googled for Hal.dll problems through this computer I'm using now. Most problems seems to be linked to an incorrect Boot.ini config. Now I thought to just start completely from scratch and went unto Microsofts website and read how the /rebuild function works exactly so I wouldn't get a malfunctioning one again.

Now my current standing is that I'm in the repair console again, but now it says it can't use the BootCfg /rebuild command because there seems to be an error in the "filesystem" making it "unable" to check for drives. I've run chkdsk as it recommended but it doesn't report any errors, and afterwards the rebuild or add command still don't work.

What the hell do I do now?:4-dontkno

My god, the state of a computer can change drastically over just a day. *sigh*

All help is greatly appreciated!ray:

 

[RhoDaZZ]

Now I have Windows installed on the drive I don't want to use again and have edited the boot.ini for my real drive to be the same as this, so it only registrers one drive, itself. I hope that this will work when I only have that drive connected to the PC, but I fear I may just get that hal.dll (checked, it IS there) or "not proper boot device" message again.

 

[RhoDaZZ]

Alright mark this as solved...I was in desperate need of help and it seems I was the one to solve it.

(Just went into the Windows folder and saw a bunch of things where missing and copied the whole folder over from the one drive to the other. And now the other is working).