Operating system not found when trying to remove old (1st) hard drive

I have an old machine that originally came with Win ME installed. A couple of years ago I added a second hard drive and installed Win XP home on that drive, and the system is currently set for dual boot. The original drive with Win ME is beginning to go bad and I want to remove it and just use the new drive with XP. I have tried removing the old drive, but when I do, I get the error message that no operating system was found. The drive with XP is being detected during boot-up, and i have set it as the master. I understand from reading posts here and other sites that I will need to copy and edit the boot.ini file and a few other files from the old ME drive, so what I'm looking for is detailed instructions on how to do this. Thanks.

 

JBM, To boot XP from a single drive, you will need to have the three following files located on the root of the primary partition of that drive:

1. boot.ini
2. ntldr
3. ntdetect.com.

The files may be present on your drive now, if that be true, then editing the boot.ini will be the only thing you need to do. The boot.ini file must point to the correct location for the system files.

A standard boot.ini file that works for XP when installed on the primary drive is as follows:

Code:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS= "XP Home" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

If you have a floppy drive, you may want to use a "Quick Boot" floppy to boot the system and copy any needed files from it. It will contain the ntldr and ntdetect.com files. It also contains a version of the boot.ini file that is structured as per the code posted above.

To create a "Quick Boot" floppy, down load THIS executable file. Run it and follow the screen prompts.

 

surferdude2, Thanks for the info. I copied the files and edited the boot.ini to what you had posted, removed the old hard drive, and everything is running fine now. Thanks again for your help.

 

Cheers! Thanks for the update so others may benefit.