David, thank you very much for your help. I have tried disconnecting the old
drive and the computer does not boot, I am very unsure about partitioning.

"David Vair" wrote:

First thing to try is to boot with only the new drive connected, if that boots OK turn off and
reconnect the other drive and use Disk Management to repartition and format. If the new drive does
not boot when other is not connected then the older drive still contains the boot files and you will
need to get the newer drive setup so its the boot. Try this first and let us know then we can work
form there.
--
Dave Vair
CNE, CNA, MCP, A+, N+

"Jonathan Andrews" wrote in message
...
Below is a post I made to XP general, this seems a more suitable place,
towards the end I make a respose to a question.

Anyone's assistance would be very welcome

Jonathan Andrews" wrote in
message ...
The problem concerns formating a second (now called D) hard drive. This
used
to be my master hard drive and until recently I booted from this. Despite
booting from the new master hard drive (now called C) I am unable to
format
this older drive (D). When I look in disk management it says that that
disk 0
(the newer one, now called C) is 160G (as expected) and is healthy
(system).
For disk 0 (now called D) it says it is 40G (as expected) but that this is
healthy (boot). That seems wrong.
I'm a bit cautious about simply doing Fdisk or formatting D through DOS
because I'm afreaid that there is something important running from this
drive.
When I try formatting D through windows I get the message
"Windows cannot format this drive. Quit any disk utilities or other
utilities that are using this drive and make sure that no window is
displaying the contents of the drive. Then try formatting again."

Your guidance on solving this would be very appreciated. It has taken me
three days to get this far, I used Norton save and recover, which has
proved
little help. The copying process was fine but when I physically swapped
the
drives into new slave/master position found that the new master was still
called D and all the short cuts were directed to C. I've successfully (I
think) used rededt32 to change the names of the drives and everything
seems
to work fine. Except for this. Shouldn't the disk management utility
recognise the new C drive as the boot?
Thanks

Joathan

You need to supply more information:
- What is your old drive - primary slave or secondary master/slave?
The old drive is the primary slave drive.
- What happens when you disconnect the old disk and boot the machine?
It fails to boot saying "Windows could not start due to a disk configuration
error"

- Which is your active partition?
sorry I don't understand this.
- Where do your hidden boot files ntdetect.com and ntldr reside?
I did a search and found copies of ntdetect.com and ntldr in service pack
folders on both c and d drives.
- What is the contents of the hidden file c:\boot.ini?
I copied this from boot.ini by going through sontrol panel/system and the
contents a
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Home
Edition" /fastdetect
- What is the contents of the hidden file d:\boot.ini (if it exists)?
I don't know if this exists, I tried searching (including hidden files) and
found only boot.ini.backup in folders called C:\windows\pss and d:\windows\pss

There are other things not working correctly, Word 2003 for instance closes down as soon as I
start typing, I couldn't use that machine to reply to your post, ie just didnt respond, and on
start up I've been occassionally getting an error message about window generic 32 (sorry I can't
recall exactly)