Dual boot to single boot

I have an older system that originally had Windows ME (FAT32) installed on the C: drive. The drive was starting to go bad, so I installed a second hard drive and installed Windows 2000 (NTFS) on this drive (D) and made a dual boot system.

The original drive is really starting to go, so I want to get rid of it all together, but am having trouble figuring out how to do this so that it will boot from the Windows 2000 drive. I then will pull the Windows ME drive out of the system.

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

Make sure all 2K pagefiles are on its own partition. Then look in the root of ME for these three files "“ you will have to show hidden files in ME to see them. Ntdetect.com - ntldr - boot.ini

Copy them to the root of 2K. Once done remove the old hard drive and set the 2K one as the primary master in the machine. Try it and if it does not boot you will need to write a MBR (Master Boot Record) to the drive. Boot to the Recovery Console and use the FIXMBR command. (Don’t use fdisk from a Win9x startup floppy).

Once in 2K you can remove the defunct boot menu entry so there is no delay on bootup. You are however stuck with D: as a drive letter as there is no way to change it "“ at least this is what Microsoft say and I’ve never been able to find a way.

You may experience lost data in 2K if anything had ever installed or saved things to the C: drive. It’s not common, but I have heard it’s possible. Keep the other drive for a while and reconnect it as slave if need be and make it C: in Disk Management.

 

Sorry Robert…..It just came to me that I’d missed a step in my instructions.

After you copy the boot.ini file to the 2K partition you have to make a slight change to that copy. First, right click on it and choose properties and make sure that the Read Only box is unchecked. Then double click the copied boot.ini and it will open in notepad. It should look something like this.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINNT= "Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
C:\ = "Microsoft Windows "


You need to change the rdisk value from 1 to zero on both lines. It should then look like this.


[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT= "Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
C:\ = "Microsoft Windows "

That’s it, close notepad with the X in the top right corner and it will ask you if you want to save changes. Choose yes. If your boot.ini is different from above then copy and paste the contents into your next post. If you have any scsi hard drives in your machine it will be different and we will need to copy another file from ME to 2K.