I have a pc with 2 hard disks set up so I could dual boot Win98Se or Win XP home. The first disk is formatted with a primary active partition ('C drive') and extended partition split into two logical drives (D and E). The second drive contains just one large extended partition with one logical drive (F). Win 98Se is installed on the C drive with programs and data on D and E. WinXP Home is installed on the F drive. I did it this way when I added the second hard disk to the system so that I could install XP on the second disk without affecting the drive letter assignments on the first disk. Problem is: the first hard disk has suffered a physical failure and is unusable. System won't boot from the second hard disk as it does not contain a primary partition. I'm happy to do without Win98 from now on and run with just one hard disk. Given that there is a complete XP installation on (what was) the F drive, can I somehow convert the extended partition to a primary active partition so I can simply boot straight into XP (after removing the faulty disk and making the second disk the master rather than slave on the IDE channel). Is this possible and, if so, how do I do it? Thanks in anticipation of any help. Peter p.s. I only have Partition Magic v5.0 and it doesn't seem to be able to do this.

I hope that I accurately understand what you have, but pull the power plug off of your bad disk, and leave the XP disk connected. Now reboot, and there is a chance that the BIOS will find the only active OS available and boot into it (being XP). I have done this when I set up my dual-boot with 2 HDs running 98 and XP respectively and could boot into either one by disconnecting the other. Hopefully the boot.ini file in XP registers XP. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime; Then industry pollutes the water and kills all the fish....

If the second hard disk consists entirely of a secondary partition and a logical drive, you will have little choice but to delete the partition and recreate a primary partition. I have never seen anything that can convert a secondary partition a primary partition. Although WinXP is on the F: drive, essential boot files, ntldr and NTDETECT.COM and boot.ini will have been put on the C: drive. AS you have discovered, Windows will not boot from a logical drive. Stuart

One can do what you want, I did with a 120gb hdd. I had it partitioned with a primary and 3 logical drives. I made the last logical drive F: into a primary which I can make active and boot to it. It is Fat32 but should not matter. You will have to have a hdd sector editor program, I use "diskedit part of Norton. Changeing the partition table is easy, the problem might be to copy the nessary data to the VBR.

>> Changeing the partition table is easy << Easy when you know what you are doing. Very easy to make a complete balls of it and lose everything. I would not recommend anyone start manually messing about with the partition table unless they are absolutely sure of what they are doing. Stuart

I will agree one can lose everything and should not be done if one can not take that chance , but in this case all will be lost if the partition is deleated :) It did take me a week to correct mistakes I made, but did not lose any data and it did increase my knowledge some. I think the best bet would be to use PM and make a small primary partition on the hdd for the "essential boot files, ntldr and NTDETECT.COM and boot.ini" , any way think PM could make the partiton without loss of OS ?

It is possible to make a primary partition on the drive with only a logical drive in an extended partition. 1 - Use PM to reduce the size of the logical drive. 2 - Use PM to reduce the size of the extended partition 3 - Move the extended partition up 4 - Use PM to copy logical drive to unallocated space, this will create your primary partition Problem - How to recreate the XP boot components in the original drive C. Also you probably will need a more current version of PM.