Undoing a dual-boot setup = headache! Any help plz?

[DaRuSsIaMaN]

Hey guys. I have kind of been away from these forums for a while... too much stuff going on. Miss you all, though.

Anyway, I'm doing some-keeping before school starts again. And one of the things I want to do is to take out one of my HDD's out of my desktop. The way I've had it is Win98 is on C: drive on my master HD. On my slave HD is WinXP on the H: drive. (you might think H is a bit weird haha) But I've never really logged into Win98, I've always just used XP, so I figure it's useless, and I want to undo this whole thing. I took out my master HDD, set the slave one (with XP on it) to master... and now the computer won't boot. I booted from my XP cd, and saw that the drive letters changed so that the XP partition is now the C: drive, and that must be the issue. Apparently, changing Windows's drive causes problems. So, how can I achieve my goal without going through an XP re-install?

Here it is again, succintly: I want to take out my HD with Win98 on it (that HD had the C: and D: drives), and I want to leave in just my HDD with the WinXP installation. How can I do that without re-installing XP?

Thanks.

 

[donkey42]

connect only the XP HDD and boot the XP recovery console and rebuild C:\boot.ini with

BOOTCFG /Rebuild

reboot & it should boot ok

Edit: or manually edit boot.ini

Source

 

[DaRuSsIaMaN]

Thanks, donkey. I read the whole thing. I'm confused, though, why don't I have to do the fixmbr command? If I don't have a boot sector on my HDD with WinXP (since apparently it was on the HDD with Win98 on it), don't I have to do that command?

 

[donkey42]

ah, right then, you need to recreate the MBR on the XP HDD, i dont know how to do it myself in XP, but, i'm sure someone will know, personally i'd probably use this:

downloadable free from here

Edit:

why don't I have to do the fixmbr command?

presumably because your XP HDD doesn't have an MBR as the MBR for your setup is on the Win98 HDD, so, you need to create an MBR on the XP HDD and tell it how to boot & what to boot