I hope someone can help me with this boot.ini problem. My computer has 2 HD’s with 2 partitions each, D and L on disc 0 and C and E on disc 1. C and D are active boot partitions. BOOT. INI, NTDETECT.COM and NTLDR are on C. This makes me dependent on disc 1 with partition C when it comes to boot process. I wish to boot from D with and without disc 1 in the computer. The OS is Windows XP Pro with Sp1 on both discs and the file system is NTFS. Drive 0 ( C ) is PATA and Drive 1 (D ) is a SATA drive. The boot.ini file looks like this today. timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect I assume I have to move the INI, NTDETECT. COM and NTLDR files from disc 1 ( C ) to disc 0 (D ) and do some modifications in the boot.ini file. Anyone who can tell me exactly what to do? thanks

Hi, you can try following steps 1. copy ntldr and ntdetect.com to the d: from c:\ unplug the c:\ and boot the system with only one hard drive 2. boot to recovery console by booting using the windows xp cd and pressing r at 1st prompt and enter the administrator password if asked to or press enter and get to a c:\windows prompt 3. once into recovery console type bootcfg /rebuild and hit enter say yes on first prompt on second prompt type" windows xp professional" on second prompt " /fastdetect" and then restart the computer normally without the 1st hard drive in All the best on this Bye now

Hi, I tried your suggestion but it didn’t work. I think the reason was that recovery console can’t find the SATA drive. Actually I’m tired of the SATA drive as a system drive, it makes thing more complicated. I’m going to change it with a PATA drive and only use the SATA for data. thanks