changed system drive, windows now very slow to start

Hello

My system has several IDE drives and I'm working on consolidating some things, but am running into some problems. The main problem I'm having right now is that booting is very slow. Here is the history, in a nutshell.
A long time ago when I only had C and D drives, windows lived on C. It was 98SE then. Then I bought a new big drive and on that one installed XP, on drive E. 98SE was pretty much dead by then, and I moved some of the things I still wanted to the second partition of my new drive, thinking I could get rid of the old C. However it turned out that windows still wanted C to boot from, and I basically left things alone like that. But now I am trying once again to remove C and D. I have copied ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini to E, edited boot.ini, and managed to boot from E. What I don't like is that when the machine boots, after detecting all my hardware, before the boot menu is shown, I get a blank screen with just a blinking cursor, as if the comp is looking for something in several unexpected places. This makes booting take a long time (the screen is up several minutes). Then the boot menu pops up, and all is well. I also get the normal graphic screen windows normally displays when booting.
My question is, why do I get this blank screen, and what can I do to make it disappear, and speed up the boot process?
An additional question: if I remove my C and D drive (now the primary IDE master and slave volumes) will my drive letters be reassigned, or will they stay the same?

Thanks in advance for any help.
Margo.

 

Note that the computer (BIOS) looks for boot information on the C: drive. That boot information on your system may be a little corrupted (the reason why it hesitates).

I don't like "manipulating" the boot system. There may be ways of rearranging your boot system, but I prefer running a "repair reinstallation" of Windows, which the Windows XP CD should pick up and offer to fix.

There is also booting to the Windows CD and going to the Recovery Console and running the FIXBOOT command, but I have not used it in your situation.

I can only say that if you remove the C: drive, boot won't be possible unless you run some sort of "fix ".

Matt

 

Thanks for your response. I've risked it anyway and removed the C drive completely. That freed up a power connector to reconnect my DVD drive. The problem has gone away since then. In fact I now have a system with no C drive, and it does not complain.

 

That's good. There may have been boot files on both drives and it confused the BIOS.