Multiboot issue

[bbdra]

Hello,

I have two HDDs in my computer, old Seagate with bad sectors and new Toshiba. Each disk contains Windows XP operating system. When I remove the Seagate hardware, my computer cannot boot into Windows on the Toshiba HDD. I tried the fixboot c: and fixmbr commands from the Windows CD, but it didn’t solve the problem.

Can anybody help please?

[Bruce]

why continue to use a drive with known bad sectors?
sounds like the bad unit has the Windows boot details on it.

backup any personal data from the Toshiba drive then reload Windows onto that via your original Windows CD.

[bbdra]

luckily i had figured it out I’m not saying it’s the right way to do it, but the problem has been fixed. First of all, I want to say that there were no boot files ntldr boot.ini NTDETECT.COM on the toshiba disk, I also copied AUTOEXEC.BAT CONFIG.SYS IO.SYS MSDOS.SYS to be sure.

Here I will describe how: I started windows 10 from my third HDD )

STEP 1.

Run CMD as ADMIN
start notepad in CMD
remove the system hidden readonly attributes so you can copy fles from the old disk to the new one (Attrib -h -s -r)
now you can modify the boot.ini file in an open notepad (only as admin or system)
then apply attrib +h +s +r to keep everything as before

STEP 2.

Run windows recovery console from WIN XP install CD

the instructions advise bootcfg /rebuild, but my boot.ini which I am modifying is incorrectly set, so the command failed

I did bootcfg /default

wow it works

STEP 3.

You can modify boot.ini file from windows

[bbdra]

why continue to use a drive with known bad sectors?
sounds like the bad unit has the Windows boot details on it.

backup any personal data from the Toshiba drive then reload Windows onto that via your original Windows CD.

I have projects on it, when i reinstall windows, program and plugins im risking that i lose some parts of my projects, thats the only reason

[bbdra]

btw anyone can try commands fixboot (driveletter) and fixmbr from recovery console too as a STEP 2b

[Bruce]

glad you got is sorted.
thanks for the instructions, it may help others down the track.