Help please.. I have two hard drives in my PC. The 1st contains the OS (XP home) and the 2nd is used for files etc. The 1st HDD is now giving SMART errors and warning that it's about to fail. So .... I've managed to put a new version of XP on the 2nd HDD and when I boot I can now select between the two versions of XP. So far so good ! So I now disconnect the fisrt HDD (with the SMART error) thinking that the system will now boot automatically from the new OS on the 2nd drive....but it doesn't. The BIOS can see the drive ok, and it's set as the primary drive, but the OS can't be seen. What am I doing wrong? ... it seems to me that there must be a OS loader or someting on the 1st drive(??). If so do I need to move this to the 2nd drive..and how do I do it? Many thanks for any help you can offer.

Hey Bob, Dumb question , but did u change the jumpers on your second hdd to master when u disconected the Drive with the problem?? Oz

you are right in your last paragraph. You need to copy ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini from the root folder of the old drive to the root folder of the second drive. Disconect the old drive and boot up with the second drive. You will still get the two boot options. One of them will work, one of them wont. When you have discovered which one does work, load boot.ini into Notepad and delete the one the doesn't work. They are listed in the same order as they appear on the screen. You may also need to reset the paramters for the default OS to the same as those for the one you are keeping so that the numbers in the brackets are the same for both. Stuart

Thanks for offering to help Stuart. I've done what you've suggested and it still doesn't work. I've copied the files you have named from the C: drive to the e: drive. I then disconnedted the c: drive and rebooted. The system still comes up with a black screen with the message "press any key to re-boot". This is really annoying ! Can you suggest anything else it could be. Thanks.

Put your second hard drive in and set the jumpers as Master. Then put the XP disc in and do a clean install. This will make a new C drive which will then become bootable. It may be a primary drive now, but it's not bootable.