I bought a second hard drive and go it working with XP. I decided to install XP on the second hard drive, with the primary one unplugged. When I did this, it made the secondary hard drive the priority in system booting. If i start up my computer, it will boot windows off the second hard drive, even with both of them plugged in and working. If i unplug the secondary hard drive, it gives me a runtime error saying there is a hardware problem, and it cant boot windows. If i boot from the CD, i can manually choose to boot XP from the primary hard drive. Is there a way to erase windows from the second hard drive and make the primary hard drive the main booting priority again?

ok i assume that you dont have an o/s on primary hdd? your second drive is a slave? first you need to do 1 of the following 1. reload o/s on the drive you want to be master , and format the second "slave drive" or you could "ghost" copy the the slave hdd to the master hdd. or if you have xp on both hdd's , as i read this in your queastion , you need to "edit " the "boot.ini" file. if this is the case and you need help to edit boot.ini file please put a copy up on site queastion and someone or me will edit it for you , ok h.t.h

First off you should never have XP with 2 bootable copies on your drives ... I would suggest you take the slave out of the picture and use a 98 boot disk and go into FDISK and set the master drive OS as active and see how it goes booting to it ... Having 2 XP OSs can screw your registry ..Keep the slave in case you might need to make it master and boot from it .. If you want to use XP X2 then use a boot manager or set up a Virtual PC ... JIM

HELP HELP im having the same problem.i have to hard drives and xp on both and i just relized it's not go'ing to work. i want to use my second drive as storage and dont care if it has no os if posiable i just want the space and to be able to play my final fantasy online please help for god said the geek shall role. so i call upon master geek for i am a beginning geek help