Make a HD UNbootable

I have two internal HD's, and on boot up, I'm required to select one to boot from. My Problem is, only one of them contains an OS and the other is only storage. Is there a way of making the later un-bootable without reformatting it? thanks for any help.... Northill

 

Make one non-active.

A hard disk must be "active" to be bootable, and this can be turned off by fdisk in a command prompt at boot-up (hold ctrl key during boot in windows 9x) but requires the active (primary) partition to be deleted. So any data on d: needs to be backed up and then restored after a new partition is made.

Otherwise I would try a startup floppy to boot dos and run fdisk and do the above.

This only marks the mbr, so is independent of the OS.

You can also boot linux to do it . If you don't have linux (which I have used, and will do it without deleting the partition), you may have to get partition magic, which I think will do it without deleting the partition.

 

Sounds like there has been a dual/multiple boot system set up, but the second OS is no longer there. Have a look at these posts for removing a dual boot system.

Even if you set the second drive to "not active ", your boot.ini will probably still ask which drive/OS to boot to, unless the dual booting setup is removed.

Matt