Boot Chaos

[Randolph Lee]

Help! My installation of Windows XP Pro has gotten
confused and thinks that it has to have my "D" drive, (w/
no files on it other than the Boot.ini, Ntldr, and
Ntdetect on it. If I try to boot w/o that drive
installed, I get the "Boot disk error" message. If I
change the boot.ini in the starup options of the System
Application, I get a message like "corrupt or missing
Hall.dll ...". In the disk management snap-in of Computer
management, my C drive is listed as the boot drive and my
D drive is listed as the system drive. I've tried
repairing the installation, but no dice. How do I re-
configure my system to boot and use the C drive as the
system drive? Also changing the boot.ini on C makes no
difference. Apparantly their is some kind of re-director
that is telling my system that drive0 is drive1 and vice-
versa. Any suggestions?

[Kent W. England [MVP]]

I have no idea how you got copies of the NT boot loader files on your D:
drive, but I don't think the floppy boot fixed your problem. In the
process, you probably switched your boot device in your BIOS back to the
correct drive. Nice job. I was puzzling over that first post, wondering
what could be the problem. :-) Normally when people change the BIOS boot
device they get a "missing NTLDR" or "no operating system" error
message.

--
Kent W. England, Microsoft MVP for Windows



"Randolph Lee" > wrote in
message ...

> Well, Hallelujah!! (sp?) I tried a doing a clean boot from
> a diskette and somehow that fixed the problem! I thought
> that that meant that I had something bad in one of the
> things being loaded at startup, but now I have re-added
> everything and it still works. Go figure!
> >-----Original Message-----
> >Help! My installation of Windows XP Pro has gotten
> >confused and thinks that it has to have my "D" drive, (w/
> >no files on it other than the Boot.ini, Ntldr, and
> >Ntdetect on it. If I try to boot w/o that drive
> >installed, I get the "Boot disk error" message. If I
> >change the boot.ini in the starup options of the System
> >Application, I get a message like "corrupt or missing
> >Hall.dll ...". In the disk management snap-in of Computer
> >management, my C drive is listed as the boot drive and my
> >D drive is listed as the system drive. I've tried
> >repairing the installation, but no dice. How do I re-
> >configure my system to boot and use the C drive as the
> >system drive? Also changing the boot.ini on C makes no
> >difference. Apparantly their is some kind of re-director
> >that is telling my system that drive0 is drive1 and vice-
> >versa. Any suggestions?
> >.
> >