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Here's the deal

I had a dual booted system with win 2k and win 98. The system was originally win 98, where I added a second hdd and installed 2k, and had it setup with the boot.ini menu etc. The HDD's were C Win98 pri master, D Win2K pri slave. All was well for years and years.

Now I need to add a .5 TB drive as a storage drive on the network for me and the mrs. I am trying to remove the C/98 drive, and put the big empty drive in its place as C, without removing or destroying the D/2K/pri slave drive. I want that to stay as is for various reasons.

I removed the old c/98 drive, installed the new C drive, and formatted it using the data life guard tools for WD Drives. All is ok, the system recognizes all the drives etc, but win 2k on D wont boot (as expected).

I have read that win 2k will boot off of a primary slave (D) as long as C has boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetect.com, and bootsect.dos. I tried this earlier by using win2k cd repair console to copy those 4 files over to the new C, and then I ran FIXBOOT and FIXMBR. When I rebooted it wouldnt boot. It sorta hangs. i then swapped boot devices in the bios to point to the D drive, and that hangs as well. So I reformatted the new drive and retried using the win2k console to copy the files over and now it doesnt even let me do that, just says "file cannot be copied". I suspec the new C is currently not setup correctly, which I can fix.

My overall question is: given the scenario of having the dual boot setup that I had originally, how would you go about doing what I am trying to do?

thanks.

Well... install windows on your new drive, and get it setup to dual boot with win 2000 (on the old drive) as default, then you can go ahead and format the new drive. I think that might work.

J2D, thanks for the reply, but I fail to see how that makes any sense.

care to explain?

Sure, installing 2k on your new drive will install the bootsector properly on the new drive and keep your old hard drive under the correct drive letter.

Of course, you'll have to use 2k's boot editor (right click on my computer, it's in there somewhere) to add the old hdd's 2k installation to the boot list.

(This is all theory, I've never tried it)

Look boot.ini file up on the internet. At least back it up if you try a reinstall.

It tells the BIOS where to boot strap from and gives you that menu of which OS to select. Probably looks something like this...

yep I did all that. thanks tho.

the info from MS regarding what I was trying to do wasnt working, then I tried something more drastic, and ended up messing up the 2k install. So I had no choice but to blow away the 2k drive, move it to primary master, and install the big empty drive as D primary slave. Its all up and running again on a clean install of 2k.

Too bad I lost a slew of stuff I had intended to keep. Oh well, less crap to worry about, and no more DBP, now its officially gone forever.

Jeez man, ever hear of a cd burner