I had one hdd with win xp home as a primary on a serial hdd... I bought another serial hdd and Installed Win xp Pro... The computer doesnt have a floppy drive, so I was wondering if I install a floppy drive and use fdisk via a floppy disk to dissable the win xp home edition as the active partion, will it communicate via the serial bus??? Or is there another way where I can dissable the Win xp Home edition so that I can see it in my computer in the windows xp pro edition... Cause im sure both of them are set as active partitions, so I'll need to dissable one of them, how do I go about this thanks...

If the floppy is working.......running fdisk to set a active partition should work. If it doesnt work....you can make a bootable dos disk on a cd, which makes booting to dos much faster. Non the less it shouldnt make any difference if you use a serial floppy drive to run fdisk. Keep in mind the jumper setting on hard drives need to set to the correct setting. I set all my drives to the auto select jumper setting. Good luck

When you installed the XP pro did you unhook the other hard drive or did you just install XP on it and now you have a black screen at start up that gives you a choice which to boot to? Or is there another way where I can dissable the Win xp Home edition so that I can see it in my computer in the windows xp pro edition... Do you mean that you can boot to the Windows XP pro but you don't see the first installed XP home in Windows Explorer? If the answer to that is yes I would say it's not because both are active. I had an old hard drive I put in a newer machine and on that old hard drive use to be an operating system when I looked at it through disk management it said that it was active but I could still see it. That was not sata drives though it was ide, it might be different. Have you looked in computer management>disk management?

Mine was set up that way too but it was a dual boot system and I selected the drive to boot through BootMagic which comes with Partition Magic.

There appears to be some confusion concerning booting XP. There is far more involved than setting the partition active. If you installed xp pro with both drives in the system this would make the xp pro drive d:. YOU CAN NOT BOOT D: BY ITSELF. Because if you did it would be c: and over 4000 registry entries using d: [as was the disk enumeration when xp pro was installed] would be invalid. Lets add the nails to the coffin in that the Xp pro boot files are on c: or the xp home drive. So if you put the sata drive alone or first it won't boot. Which brings us to the first order of business concerning booting. DOES YOUR BIOS SUPPORT BOOTING FROM THE SATA DRIVE? I would assume so but that is the first step - the bios boot order. Before anyone can properly advise you we need to know HOW you installed the 2nd disk and xp pro. Once we know that proper advice can be given to get you where you want to be. Golly gee wilerkers everyone. Learn to Internet Search

Hi guys, thanks to all of you for taking the time to respond... Let me clear any confusion ;o) Here's how I did the setup 1. The serial 160 Gig hdd with the corrupt Win XP Home was unplugged from the power supply cable... 2. Then I setup and Installed Win XP Pro on the second serial 250 Gig hdd... 3. After installing Win XP Pro and booting for the first time, I installed the Anti virus, office 2003 ect... 4. Finally I plugged in the serial 160 Gig hdd with the corrupt Win xp Home so that I could try and access it as an additional drive to be able to get all the files I needed to recover... 5. Here's the problem, the win xp home doesnt show up as a drive letter since I figured it maintained the drive letter C: as its default and its also a primary, maybe thats screwing the whole thing up and since the Win XP Pro is using the C: as the drive letter, the Win xp Home stays hidden ??? Note: the corrupt win xp home on the 160 hdd does show up in disk management, but I cant add a drive letter to it, same goes for Partition magic, it shows up as a partition but the advance selection in partition magic is shaded, I cant add a drive letter to it, same problem...