Hi. I've got a major problem of booting up my computer. I used to have 2 HD drives. A master 30 GB and a slave 60 GB. After a couple years of using them, my current working copy of windows XP is installed on the secondary drive. Everything is fine until I decided to take my secondary drive and use it as a primary. I do not have the 30 GB drive anymore as I thought I would no longer need it (seeing that win xp was installed on the 60 GB one). The problem now is that when I try to boot from the 60 GB HD, the bios just sees it and then after a while prints a message which just says "Press A key to restart". Windows doesnt even load!!! :( Is there anyway I can get the dam windows xp on the HD to work?? Im really desperate thanks.

Simple question, did you set the jumper to master instead of slave?

Actually, if the 30GB was set to master, that's where the master boot record resided, even if XP was loaded on the second drive. Now you've removed the drive with the MBR, and the system doesn't see the installed OS. You could try starting up with a Windows boot disk, and use fdisk /mbr, but I'm not sure it will work. You SHOULD be able to reinstall XP on the 60GB, and not lose anything. (I've done it a few times...about half the time it works properly, other times I lose data. Lots of luck!

Thanks guys. I figured the MBR was on my other drive :P Made a silly mistake....well I think intalling...yet another copy of winxp on the 60 GB drive might work. Then after that I'll have to figure out how to switch back to the copy of windows there is currently on the drive. Off to install windows.....yet again.

You won't be able to, but make sure you have full access to all your old install files (no encryption or restrictions) so then you can 'take ownership' of them in the new install and safely recover them. Good luck,