XP partition moved, wont boot now :)

[jackvdbuk]

been trying to sort a mates pc out (now has no pc use thanks to me now hehe) well he had a dell vista/xp (bootable) hdd setup in his custom built pc (i built it!), wanted to move his xp partition over to his 500gb so the vista can be used back in the dell pc he has but now after i moved his XP partition over to his 500 it doesnt boot! now ive made it 'active' and its a physical partition with another partition after it with just normal files on.

tried the fixboot/mbr commands no luck (thought this would work)
tried to do bootcfg /*forgot the exact command* and it didnt find the windows on the harddrive.

any help at all would be great, have access to boot cd's and ubuntu live cd if needed

[charleski]

I suspect a problem with the boot sequence. What is the actual configuration of the PC? What drives are in there? The drive with XP on it must be set to be the first seen by the system on boot

[jackvdbuk]

i set the harddrive as the first boot device but get the dreaded ntldr is missing error,

and as for config? what exactly do you mean?

[charleski]

It looks like another disc is being used to boot. What other discs do you have hooked up, and are they SATA or IDE?

[jackvdbuk]

well after i moved xp to the 500gb i removed the 250gb (one that had the dell vista and original xp on) but i remember noticing that the XP was classed as D, does that mean anything?

right, the git has reinstalled XP on the 500gb hdd after me tellin him not to! but thanks anyway charleski if anyone does know why or how it will not boot then do tell!

[charleski]

well after i moved xp to the 500gb i removed the 250gb (one that had the dell vista and original xp on) but i remember noticing that the XP was classed as D, does that mean anything?

Yes, it means the bootloader won't be able to find NTLDR . That has to be on the first drive in the system. Is the 500Gb drive the only one in the system now? Unplug any USB drives as well.

[Behemoth]

The only thing I can think of to fix this would have been to use the XP CD or Vista CD and do a repair install, should work fine

[IAmATeaf]

You've got 2 problems here, firstly the Windows bootloader was on the C: drive which is no longer there and XP was installed on a drive/partition labelled D: which again as it's a single drive system may not appear as D:

The only thing I can think of doing would be to create a partition on the 500gb drive, format it and hope that it comes up as C:, make this partition the active partition then run fixboot on it.

[kalniel]

Agree with the above. You need an active partition, probably at the start of the disk, that you can create an MBR in.

I do NOT recommend using the xp repair disk anymore - it overwrites the automatic system update utility which was recently (silently) updated. The overwrite back with the old version can stop you from recieving any updates unless you play about with the registry.