unable to boot now that one drive went bad in dual boot config

I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on a
different hard drive. I select at boot up which OS to go into. Now,
one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write). I removed it, but now I
get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or insert a boot disk
at startup. I tried reselecting the remaining drive in the BIOS and the
boot up menu and I still get the same message. This is for my drive
with XP that I used singly for years before I reconfigured to dual boot.
My guess is that when I added the drive with Win 7 on it, I must have
placed the dual boot program on there also. How can I now get the XP
drive to boot the way it used to by itself? Thanks.

On 09/03/2018 20:33, JBI wrote:
I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on a
different hard drive. I select at boot up which OS to go into. Now,
one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write). I removed it, but now
I get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or insert a boot
disk at startup. I tried reselecting the remaining drive in the BIOS
and the boot up menu and I still get the same message. This is for my
drive with XP that I used singly for years before I reconfigured to
dual boot. My guess is that when I added the drive with Win 7 on it,
I must have placed the dual boot program on there also. How can I now
get the XP drive to boot the way it used to by itself? Thanks.


Manually edit the file called "boot.ini" that is saved in the root
folder of your default system.

All dual boot system have a default OS that kicks in after some time
(the default is 30 seconds but some nutters would change it to 5
seconds). In your case, it looks like th default drive is corrupted so
perhaps changing the boot.ini file to the other drive might do the trick.

Obviously, you need to boot the system using something else like usb
drive or linux system but I leave this to you to investigate it further
in your own time as Linux is not supported here.



--
With over 600 million devices now running Windows 10, customer
satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows.

This document will help you how to go about editing the file:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/overview-of-the-boot-ini-file

/--- This email has been checked for viruses by Windows Defender
software.
//https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/comprehensive-security/



On 09/03/2018 21:34, Good Guy wrote:
On 09/03/2018 20:33, JBI wrote:
I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on a
different hard drive. I select at boot up which OS to go into. Now,
one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write). I removed it, but
now I get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or insert a
boot disk at startup. I tried reselecting the remaining drive in the
BIOS and the boot up menu and I still get the same message. This is
for my drive with XP that I used singly for years before I
reconfigured to dual boot. My guess is that when I added the drive
with Win 7 on it, I must have placed the dual boot program on there
also. How can I now get the XP drive to boot the way it used to by
itself? Thanks.


Manually edit the file called "boot.ini" that is saved in the root
folder of your default system.

All dual boot system have a default OS that kicks in after some time
(the default is 30 seconds but some nutters would change it to 5
seconds). In your case, it looks like th default drive is corrupted
so perhaps changing the boot.ini file to the other drive might do the
trick.

Obviously, you need to boot the system using something else like usb
drive or linux system but I leave this to you to investigate it
further in your own time as Linux is not supported here.






--
With over 600 million devices now running Windows 10, customer
satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows.

JBI wrote:
I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on a
different hard drive. I select at boot up which OS to go into. Now,
one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write). I removed it, but now I
get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or insert a boot disk
at startup. I tried reselecting the remaining drive in the BIOS and the
boot up menu and I still get the same message. This is for my drive
with XP that I used singly for years before I reconfigured to dual boot.
My guess is that when I added the drive with Win 7 on it, I must have
placed the dual boot program on there also. How can I now get the XP
drive to boot the way it used to by itself? Thanks.



The first questions are physical.

I don't need to ask any questions, if your two drives are SATA.

If the two drives are IDE, they could be sharing a cable,
they could be master/slave/cable_select. If you remove
a drive from a two-drive cable setup, you *may* need to
correct the jumpers.

Please indicate whether you need info on how to set up
IDE drives. IDE is the "wide ribbon cable" thing. SATA
by comparison, is the narrow red one, with only seven contacts
on the data cable.

*******

A cardinal rule of OS installation is:

Always unplug *all* the other hard drives before installing an OS.

Then, the OS install can only "damage" the disk you think it's damaging.

So if your intention was to have a Win7 disk, completely
independent of the WinXP disk, you'd unplug the WinXP disk
before installing Win7.

Now, later, if you wanted a "dual boot menu" in your Windows 7,
only one BIOS boot disk setting, you would then use "EasyBCD" to
add the second OS. You would point the BIOS to the Win7 drive
(with dual boot BCD entries), and either OS could be launched
from there.

If the Win7 drive dies, yes, the BCD on its drive is lost.
But the boot.ini on the WinXP C: drive was never removed, and
should work.

In fact, I'm having trouble imaging how this happened, as
it's really pretty hard to foul up that setup. It would hav
taken the Windows 7 install putting System Reserved on the
WinXP drive, to ruin it. That's about the only way I know
of to ruin it.

*******

OK, let's discuss fixing it.

You will always need some sort of tools to do the fixes with.

A WinXP installer CD is one possible tool, and it has a couple
of things that are harder to find elsewhere.

https://s10.postimg.org/8465fhoix/winxp_install_cd.gif


| -- MBR --------| ---------------- C: --------------------|
| Boot | Partition | Partition boot.ini rest of WinXP C: |
| Code | Table | Boot Record |

^ ^ ^ ^
| | | |
"fixmbr" | "fixboot" "more C:\boot.ini"
Set (to read this file)
Active
Flag on
C: partition
"diskpart"???

For "fixmbr" and "Fixboot", you'll need your WinXP installer CD.
Find the recipe for getting into repair mode. You will be prompted
for the administrator password. The target partitions are numbered.
You'll be typing "1" to select the only partition with winXP on it,
then entering the Administrator password.

Once there, you run "fixmbr" to repair the tiny fraction
of a sector of boot code on the MBR.

You enter "fixboot" to repair the PBR, where the PBR is
as much as 1536 bytes of information or so. It'll probably
ask to confirm that you want that on C: .

The "diskpart" one, looks pretty easy.

diskpart
list disk # only one disk called disk 0
select disk 0 # select the only disk in the menu
list partition # The partition size is your hint of your C:
select partition 1 # My first partition is WinXP
detail partition # How you find out stuff, with "detail" option

Partition 1
Type : 07
Hidden : No
Active : No === Oops, OK, we need to fix this

Active # This makes the currently selected partition
# the active one

detail partition # now we check it again

Partition 1
Type : 07
Hidden : No
Active : Yes === OK, C: is ready to boot (or close to it)

exit # All done

*******

To edit the boot.ini is going to be more of a challenge.
I would avoid the following section entirely, and just
try and boot the WinXP drive after the above have been
applied. If it still won't boot, you can work on it.

Editing the boot.ini really should not be necessary at all,
first of all.

The "ARC" should point at the partition we were working on
in the diskpart step. You can see my boot.ini is pointed at
Disk 0 and Partition 1, just like diskpart.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn /PAE
C:\ = "WINXPNEW 1TB drive"

To access boot.ini , I'm not being offered an editor on my
WinXP CD. I can do this:

help
more C:\boot.ini

and at least review the text to see it's sane.

It's generally not recommended to use things like "bootcfg"
or other automations of that type. If you had some customization,
it might remove it. Best practice is to save a copy of your
existing file for later, if you do want to experiment.

copy boot.ini boot.ini.bak

Now you can mess around if you want.

You may be able to slave the WinXP drive to another
Windows machine, and work on the boot.ini there. Just
remember boot.ini has "Hidden" and "System" attributes, which
may require the usage of "attrib" command to modify
and de-fuse. Attrib can be used to temporarily turn off
attributes, making further access or listing possible.

help attrib

*******

The above answer assumes the Win7 drive is the one that died,
and the WinXP drive remains. Make sure the IDE jumpers are set
properly, before going to all the trouble of booting the WinXP
installer CD. It boots pretty slow and is annoying. I use
"fixboot" all the time here, when "housecleaning" my WinXP partition
and am now very familiar with the lengthy boot. And yes, my other
drives are unplugged while I work on it :-) Then, the login
prompt only has 1 partition on offer, so I cannot go wrong.

HTH,
Paul

On 03/09/2018 11:34 PM, Paul wrote:
JBI wrote:
I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on a
different hard drive.Â* I select at boot up which OS to go into.Â* Now,
one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write).Â* I removed it, but now
I get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or insert a boot
disk at startup.Â* I tried reselecting the remaining drive in the BIOS
and the boot up menu and I still get the same message.Â* This is for my
drive with XP that I used singly for years before I reconfigured to
dual boot. Â*My guess is that when I added the drive with Win 7 on it,
I must have placed the dual boot program on there also.Â* How can I now
get the XP drive to boot the way it used to by itself?Â* Thanks.



The first questions are physical.

I don't need to ask any questions, if your two drives are SATA.

If the two drives are IDE, they could be sharing a cable,
they could be master/slave/cable_select. If you remove
a drive from a two-drive cable setup, you *may* need to
correct the jumpers.

Please indicate whether you need info on how to set up
IDE drives. IDE is the "wide ribbon cable" thing. SATA
by comparison, is the narrow red one, with only seven contacts
on the data cable.

*******

A cardinal rule of OS installation is:

Â*Â* Always unplug *all* the other hard drives before installing an OS.

Â*Â* Then, the OS install can only "damage" the disk you think it's
damaging.

So if your intention was to have a Win7 disk, completely
independent of the WinXP disk, you'd unplug the WinXP disk
before installing Win7.

Now, later, if you wanted a "dual boot menu" in your Windows 7,
only one BIOS boot disk setting, you would then use "EasyBCD" to
add the second OS. You would point the BIOS to the Win7 drive
(with dual boot BCD entries), and either OS could be launched
from there.

If the Win7 drive dies, yes, the BCD on its drive is lost.
But the boot.ini on the WinXP C: drive was never removed, and
should work.

In fact, I'm having trouble imaging how this happened, as
it's really pretty hard to foul up that setup. It would hav
taken the Windows 7 install putting System Reserved on the
WinXP drive, to ruin it. That's about the only way I know
of to ruin it.

*******

OK, let's discuss fixing it.

You will always need some sort of tools to do the fixes with.

A WinXP installer CD is one possible tool, and it has a couple
of things that are harder to find elsewhere.

https://s10.postimg.org/8465fhoix/winxp_install_cd.gif


| -- MBR --------| ---------------- C: --------------------|
| Boot | Partition | PartitionÂ*Â*Â*Â* boot.iniÂ* rest of WinXP C:Â* |
| Code | TableÂ*Â*Â*Â* | Boot RecordÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* |

Â*Â* ^Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* ^Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* ^Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* ^
Â*Â* |Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* |Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* |Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* |
Â*"fixmbr"Â*Â* |Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* "fixboot"Â*Â*Â*Â* "more C:\boot.ini"
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* SetÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* (to read this file)
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Active
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Flag on
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* C: partition
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* "diskpart"???

For "fixmbr" and "Fixboot", you'll need your WinXP installer CD.
Find the recipe for getting into repair mode. You will be prompted
for the administrator password. The target partitions are numbered.
You'll be typing "1" to select the only partition with winXP on it,
then entering the Administrator password.

Once there, you run "fixmbr" to repair the tiny fraction
of a sector of boot code on the MBR.

You enter "fixboot" to repair the PBR, where the PBR is
as much as 1536 bytes of information or so. It'll probably
ask to confirm that you want that on C: .

The "diskpart" one, looks pretty easy.

diskpart
list diskÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # only one disk called disk 0
select disk 0Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # select the only disk in the menu
list partitionÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # The partition size is your hint of your C:
select partition 1Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # My first partition is WinXP
detail partitionÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # How you find out stuff, with "detail"
option

Partition 1
TypeÂ*Â* : 07
Hidden : No
Active : NoÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* === Oops, OK, we need to fix this

ActiveÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Â* # This makes the currently selected partition
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Â*Â*Â*Â* # the active one

detail partitionÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # now we check it again

Partition 1
TypeÂ*Â* : 07
Hidden : No
Active : YesÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* === OK, C: is ready to boot (or close to it)

exitÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Â*Â* # All done

*******

To edit the boot.ini is going to be more of a challenge.
I would avoid the following section entirely, and just
try and boot the WinXP drive after the above have been
applied. If it still won't boot, you can work on it.

Editing the boot.ini really should not be necessary at all,
first of all.

The "ARC" should point at the partition we were working on
in the diskpart step. You can see my boot.ini is pointed at
Disk 0 and Partition 1, just like diskpart.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn /PAE
C:\ = "WINXPNEW 1TB drive"

To access boot.ini , I'm not being offered an editor on my
WinXP CD. I can do this:

Â*Â* help
Â*Â* more C:\boot.ini

and at least review the text to see it's sane.

It's generally not recommended to use things like "bootcfg"
or other automations of that type. If you had some customization,
it might remove it. Best practice is to save a copy of your
existing file for later, if you do want to experiment.

Â*Â* copy boot.ini boot.ini.bak

Now you can mess around if you want.

You may be able to slave the WinXP drive to another
Windows machine, and work on the boot.ini there. Just
remember boot.ini has "Hidden" and "System" attributes, which
may require the usage of "attrib" command to modify
and de-fuse. Attrib can be used to temporarily turn off
attributes, making further access or listing possible.

Â*Â* help attrib

*******

The above answer assumes the Win7 drive is the one that died,
and the WinXP drive remains. Make sure the IDE jumpers are set
properly, before going to all the trouble of booting the WinXP
installer CD. It boots pretty slow and is annoying. I use
"fixboot" all the time here, when "housecleaning" my WinXP partition
and am now very familiar with the lengthy boot. And yes, my other
drives are unplugged while I work on it :-) Then, the login
prompt only has 1 partition on offer, so I cannot go wrong.

HTH,
Â*Â* Paul

Thanks for the information. Just when I thought the drive might be
shot, I hooked it up with a USB-SATA adapter and it seems to be working
normally, so not sure what to do next.

By the way, it is the XP drive that went bad and not the Win 7 drive.
One of the earlier repliers actually had this right from the start and I
didn't. However, I'm not even sure if the drive is bad now since it
seems to be working with the adapter. I'm wondering if there's a way to
be sure? I'll keep it coupled to the laptop this way and run some
recommended tests.

At one point when I was trying to boot up with it in the desktop
configuration, I got a blue screen that said something about a pci.sys
error. I've been wondering for a while if adding a USB 3 card to my
desktop caused problems. My desktop would also randomly reboot for no
reason. At first I thought memory but Memtest revealed no problems
after running overnight. I've since removed the USB 3 card as next
possible suspect, assuming this drive *really is* ok. I'm wondering if
the USB 3 card could cause issues even if it was working correctly?? I
got it in order to do faster backups, which it did well.

Thanks,
JBI

On 03/10/2018 11:31 AM, JBI wrote:
On 03/09/2018 11:34 PM, Paul wrote:
JBI wrote:
I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on a
different hard drive.Â* I select at boot up which OS to go into.Â* Now,
one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write).Â* I removed it, but
now I get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or insert a
boot disk at startup.Â* I tried reselecting the remaining drive in the
BIOS and the boot up menu and I still get the same message.Â* This is
for my drive with XP that I used singly for years before I
reconfigured to dual boot. Â*My guess is that when I added the drive
with Win 7 on it, I must have placed the dual boot program on there
also.Â* How can I now get the XP drive to boot the way it used to by
itself?Â* Thanks.



The first questions are physical.

I don't need to ask any questions, if your two drives are SATA.

If the two drives are IDE, they could be sharing a cable,
they could be master/slave/cable_select. If you remove
a drive from a two-drive cable setup, you *may* need to
correct the jumpers.

Please indicate whether you need info on how to set up
IDE drives. IDE is the "wide ribbon cable" thing. SATA
by comparison, is the narrow red one, with only seven contacts
on the data cable.

*******

A cardinal rule of OS installation is:

Â*Â*Â* Always unplug *all* the other hard drives before installing an OS.

Â*Â*Â* Then, the OS install can only "damage" the disk you think it's
damaging.

So if your intention was to have a Win7 disk, completely
independent of the WinXP disk, you'd unplug the WinXP disk
before installing Win7.

Now, later, if you wanted a "dual boot menu" in your Windows 7,
only one BIOS boot disk setting, you would then use "EasyBCD" to
add the second OS. You would point the BIOS to the Win7 drive
(with dual boot BCD entries), and either OS could be launched
from there.

If the Win7 drive dies, yes, the BCD on its drive is lost.
But the boot.ini on the WinXP C: drive was never removed, and
should work.

In fact, I'm having trouble imaging how this happened, as
it's really pretty hard to foul up that setup. It would hav
taken the Windows 7 install putting System Reserved on the
WinXP drive, to ruin it. That's about the only way I know
of to ruin it.

*******

OK, let's discuss fixing it.

You will always need some sort of tools to do the fixes with.

A WinXP installer CD is one possible tool, and it has a couple
of things that are harder to find elsewhere.

https://s10.postimg.org/8465fhoix/winxp_install_cd.gif


| -- MBR --------| ---------------- C: --------------------|
| Boot | Partition | PartitionÂ*Â*Â*Â* boot.iniÂ* rest of WinXP C:Â* |
| Code | TableÂ*Â*Â*Â* | Boot RecordÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* |

Â*Â*Â* ^Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* ^Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* ^Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* ^
Â*Â*Â* |Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* |Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* |Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* |
Â*Â*"fixmbr"Â*Â* |Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* "fixboot"Â*Â*Â*Â* "more C:\boot.ini"
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* SetÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* (to read this file)
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Active
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Flag on
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* C: partition
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* "diskpart"???

For "fixmbr" and "Fixboot", you'll need your WinXP installer CD.
Find the recipe for getting into repair mode. You will be prompted
for the administrator password. The target partitions are numbered.
You'll be typing "1" to select the only partition with winXP on it,
then entering the Administrator password.

Once there, you run "fixmbr" to repair the tiny fraction
of a sector of boot code on the MBR.

You enter "fixboot" to repair the PBR, where the PBR is
as much as 1536 bytes of information or so. It'll probably
ask to confirm that you want that on C: .

The "diskpart" one, looks pretty easy.

diskpart
list diskÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # only one disk called disk 0
select disk 0Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # select the only disk in the menu
list partitionÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # The partition size is your hint of
your C:
select partition 1Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # My first partition is WinXP
detail partitionÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # How you find out stuff, with "detail"
option

Partition 1
TypeÂ*Â* : 07
Hidden : No
Active : NoÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* === Oops, OK, we need to fix this

ActiveÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Â* # This makes the currently selected
partition
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # the active one

detail partitionÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # now we check it again

Partition 1
TypeÂ*Â* : 07
Hidden : No
Active : YesÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* === OK, C: is ready to boot (or close
to it)

exitÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Â*Â* # All done

*******

To edit the boot.ini is going to be more of a challenge.
I would avoid the following section entirely, and just
try and boot the WinXP drive after the above have been
applied. If it still won't boot, you can work on it.

Editing the boot.ini really should not be necessary at all,
first of all.

The "ARC" should point at the partition we were working on
in the diskpart step. You can see my boot.ini is pointed at
Disk 0 and Partition 1, just like diskpart.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn /PAE
C:\ = "WINXPNEW 1TB drive"

To access boot.ini , I'm not being offered an editor on my
WinXP CD. I can do this:

Â*Â*Â* help
Â*Â*Â* more C:\boot.ini

and at least review the text to see it's sane.

It's generally not recommended to use things like "bootcfg"
or other automations of that type. If you had some customization,
it might remove it. Best practice is to save a copy of your
existing file for later, if you do want to experiment.

Â*Â*Â* copy boot.ini boot.ini.bak

Now you can mess around if you want.

You may be able to slave the WinXP drive to another
Windows machine, and work on the boot.ini there. Just
remember boot.ini has "Hidden" and "System" attributes, which
may require the usage of "attrib" command to modify
and de-fuse. Attrib can be used to temporarily turn off
attributes, making further access or listing possible.

Â*Â*Â* help attrib

*******

The above answer assumes the Win7 drive is the one that died,
and the WinXP drive remains. Make sure the IDE jumpers are set
properly, before going to all the trouble of booting the WinXP
installer CD. It boots pretty slow and is annoying. I use
"fixboot" all the time here, when "housecleaning" my WinXP partition
and am now very familiar with the lengthy boot. And yes, my other
drives are unplugged while I work on it :-) Then, the login
prompt only has 1 partition on offer, so I cannot go wrong.

HTH,
Â*Â*Â* Paul

Thanks for the information.Â* Just when I thought the drive might be
shot, I hooked it up with a USB-SATA adapter and it seems to be working
normally, so not sure what to do next.

By the way, it is the XP drive that went bad and not the Win 7 drive.
One of the earlier repliers actually had this right from the start and I
didn't.Â* However, I'm not even sure if the drive is bad now since it
seems to be working with the adapter.Â* I'm wondering if there's a way to
be sure?Â* I'll keep it coupled to the laptop this way and run some
recommended tests.

At one point when I was trying to boot up with it in the desktop
configuration, I got a blue screen that said something about a pci.sys
error.Â* I've been wondering for a while if adding a USB 3 card to my
desktop caused problems.Â* My desktop would also randomly reboot for no
reason.Â* At first I thought memory but Memtest revealed no problems
after running overnight.Â* I've since removed the USB 3 card as next
possible suspect, assuming this drive *really is* ok.Â* I'm wondering if
the USB 3 card could cause issues even if it was working correctly??Â* I
got it in order to do faster backups, which it did well.

Thanks,
JBI

Ok, while I was waiting for recommendations, I found this page:

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/hard-disk-drive-health

While I had the drive hooked up in Win 7 with the USB-SATA adapter, I
ran WMIC and it reported "OK" status. To be sure, since it didn't
specify which of the three drives in the system were ok (just three
ok's), I disconnected the USB drive and it simply reported two ok's.

From this I assume the drive is ok then?

JBI wrote:
On 03/10/2018 11:31 AM, JBI wrote:
On 03/09/2018 11:34 PM, Paul wrote:
JBI wrote:
I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on
a different hard drive. I select at boot up which OS to go into.
Now, one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write). I removed it,
but now I get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or
insert a boot disk at startup. I tried reselecting the remaining
drive in the BIOS and the boot up menu and I still get the same
message. This is for my drive with XP that I used singly for years
before I reconfigured to dual boot. My guess is that when I added
the drive with Win 7 on it, I must have placed the dual boot program
on there also. How can I now get the XP drive to boot the way it
used to by itself? Thanks.



The first questions are physical.

I don't need to ask any questions, if your two drives are SATA.

If the two drives are IDE, they could be sharing a cable,
they could be master/slave/cable_select. If you remove
a drive from a two-drive cable setup, you *may* need to
correct the jumpers.

Please indicate whether you need info on how to set up
IDE drives. IDE is the "wide ribbon cable" thing. SATA
by comparison, is the narrow red one, with only seven contacts
on the data cable.

*******

A cardinal rule of OS installation is:

Always unplug *all* the other hard drives before installing an OS.

Then, the OS install can only "damage" the disk you think it's
damaging.

So if your intention was to have a Win7 disk, completely
independent of the WinXP disk, you'd unplug the WinXP disk
before installing Win7.

Now, later, if you wanted a "dual boot menu" in your Windows 7,
only one BIOS boot disk setting, you would then use "EasyBCD" to
add the second OS. You would point the BIOS to the Win7 drive
(with dual boot BCD entries), and either OS could be launched
from there.

If the Win7 drive dies, yes, the BCD on its drive is lost.
But the boot.ini on the WinXP C: drive was never removed, and
should work.

In fact, I'm having trouble imaging how this happened, as
it's really pretty hard to foul up that setup. It would hav
taken the Windows 7 install putting System Reserved on the
WinXP drive, to ruin it. That's about the only way I know
of to ruin it.

*******

OK, let's discuss fixing it.

You will always need some sort of tools to do the fixes with.

A WinXP installer CD is one possible tool, and it has a couple
of things that are harder to find elsewhere.

https://s10.postimg.org/8465fhoix/winxp_install_cd.gif


| -- MBR --------| ---------------- C: --------------------|
| Boot | Partition | Partition boot.ini rest of WinXP C: |
| Code | Table | Boot Record |

^ ^ ^ ^
| | | |
"fixmbr" | "fixboot" "more C:\boot.ini"
Set (to read this file)
Active
Flag on
C: partition
"diskpart"???

For "fixmbr" and "Fixboot", you'll need your WinXP installer CD.
Find the recipe for getting into repair mode. You will be prompted
for the administrator password. The target partitions are numbered.
You'll be typing "1" to select the only partition with winXP on it,
then entering the Administrator password.

Once there, you run "fixmbr" to repair the tiny fraction
of a sector of boot code on the MBR.

You enter "fixboot" to repair the PBR, where the PBR is
as much as 1536 bytes of information or so. It'll probably
ask to confirm that you want that on C: .

The "diskpart" one, looks pretty easy.

diskpart
list disk # only one disk called disk 0
select disk 0 # select the only disk in the menu
list partition # The partition size is your hint of
your C:
select partition 1 # My first partition is WinXP
detail partition # How you find out stuff, with "detail"
option

Partition 1
Type : 07
Hidden : No
Active : No === Oops, OK, we need to fix this

Active # This makes the currently selected
partition
# the active one

detail partition # now we check it again

Partition 1
Type : 07
Hidden : No
Active : Yes === OK, C: is ready to boot (or close
to it)

exit # All done

*******

To edit the boot.ini is going to be more of a challenge.
I would avoid the following section entirely, and just
try and boot the WinXP drive after the above have been
applied. If it still won't boot, you can work on it.

Editing the boot.ini really should not be necessary at all,
first of all.

The "ARC" should point at the partition we were working on
in the diskpart step. You can see my boot.ini is pointed at
Disk 0 and Partition 1, just like diskpart.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn /PAE
C:\ = "WINXPNEW 1TB drive"

To access boot.ini , I'm not being offered an editor on my
WinXP CD. I can do this:

help
more C:\boot.ini

and at least review the text to see it's sane.

It's generally not recommended to use things like "bootcfg"
or other automations of that type. If you had some customization,
it might remove it. Best practice is to save a copy of your
existing file for later, if you do want to experiment.

copy boot.ini boot.ini.bak

Now you can mess around if you want.

You may be able to slave the WinXP drive to another
Windows machine, and work on the boot.ini there. Just
remember boot.ini has "Hidden" and "System" attributes, which
may require the usage of "attrib" command to modify
and de-fuse. Attrib can be used to temporarily turn off
attributes, making further access or listing possible.

help attrib

*******

The above answer assumes the Win7 drive is the one that died,
and the WinXP drive remains. Make sure the IDE jumpers are set
properly, before going to all the trouble of booting the WinXP
installer CD. It boots pretty slow and is annoying. I use
"fixboot" all the time here, when "housecleaning" my WinXP partition
and am now very familiar with the lengthy boot. And yes, my other
drives are unplugged while I work on it :-) Then, the login
prompt only has 1 partition on offer, so I cannot go wrong.

HTH,
Paul

Thanks for the information. Just when I thought the drive might be
shot, I hooked it up with a USB-SATA adapter and it seems to be
working normally, so not sure what to do next.

By the way, it is the XP drive that went bad and not the Win 7 drive.
One of the earlier repliers actually had this right from the start and
I didn't. However, I'm not even sure if the drive is bad now since it
seems to be working with the adapter. I'm wondering if there's a way
to be sure? I'll keep it coupled to the laptop this way and run some
recommended tests.

At one point when I was trying to boot up with it in the desktop
configuration, I got a blue screen that said something about a pci.sys
error. I've been wondering for a while if adding a USB 3 card to my
desktop caused problems. My desktop would also randomly reboot for no
reason. At first I thought memory but Memtest revealed no problems
after running overnight. I've since removed the USB 3 card as next
possible suspect, assuming this drive *really is* ok. I'm wondering
if the USB 3 card could cause issues even if it was working
correctly?? I got it in order to do faster backups, which it did well.

Thanks,
JBI

Ok, while I was waiting for recommendations, I found this page:

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/hard-disk-drive-health

While I had the drive hooked up in Win 7 with the USB-SATA adapter, I
ran WMIC and it reported "OK" status. To be sure, since it didn't
specify which of the three drives in the system were ok (just three
ok's), I disconnected the USB drive and it simply reported two ok's.

From this I assume the drive is ok then?

I don't think there is S.M.A.R.T. tunneling through USB. SMART
is how you get a quick indication of drive health.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

The drive should be connected to a *SATA* port, then check the health.
SMART works over SATA or IDE, not USB as far as I know.

The free version of HDTune has a "Health" tab and you can look
at that for the "Reallocated" raw data field. It should be zero,
under normal conditions. This program is 10 years old now. It's
not the trial version - this one is perfectly free.

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

The hard drive "temperature" is delivered via SMART, so if HDTune
shows a temperature, that's generally a good sign. If the temperature
isn't shown, then SMART might not be available over the hardware path
being used.

*******

Seagate and Western Digital (wdc.com) have diagnostic programs
for their drives. They will show a "code" if the drive is bad.
They will say the drive "passed" if it is good. You can use
tests like that for more info.

So, you have two drives. One is questionable. The other one boots ?
I got the impression you had a broken drive and a non-booting
drive.

What's your inventory now ?

Macrium Reflect Free emergency boot CD, has a "boot repair" menu
item, which is good for Vista+ problems. But I wouldn't reach for
that yet, because the root cause of your failure is unknown.
Doing a lot of writes to the drive, might not actually
be a good idea, depending on what is broken.

Checking the health is probably a start, but won't provide
all the answers.

I use the "Boot Repair" on Macrium, after some other boot-related
thing has fouled up.

If the disk is corrupted, it might even be dangerous to use CHKDSK
(in its repair mode). Some partitions have been absolutely
destroyed by CHKDSK, which is why it's regarded as a
"good/bad" tool. It's good when it fixes stuff,
and bad when it destroys stuff. That's why is has to be
used with a good deal of skepticism. If I have concerns
that the hardware itself is bad, I concentrate on doing
a backup first. The gddrescue package on Linux (GNU
ddrescue) can make backups, when other utilities refuse to
do it.

Paul

On 03/10/2018 12:22 PM, Paul wrote:
JBI wrote:
On 03/10/2018 11:31 AM, JBI wrote:
On 03/09/2018 11:34 PM, Paul wrote:
JBI wrote:
I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on
a different hard drive.Â* I select at boot up which OS to go into.
Now, one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write).Â* I removed it,
but now I get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or
insert a boot disk at startup.Â* I tried reselecting the remaining
drive in the BIOS and the boot up menu and I still get the same
message.Â* This is for my drive with XP that I used singly for years
before I reconfigured to dual boot.Â* My guess is that when I added
the drive with Win 7 on it, I must have placed the dual boot
program on there also.Â* How can I now get the XP drive to boot the
way it used to by itself?Â* Thanks.



The first questions are physical.

I don't need to ask any questions, if your two drives are SATA.

If the two drives are IDE, they could be sharing a cable,
they could be master/slave/cable_select. If you remove
a drive from a two-drive cable setup, you *may* need to
correct the jumpers.

Please indicate whether you need info on how to set up
IDE drives. IDE is the "wide ribbon cable" thing. SATA
by comparison, is the narrow red one, with only seven contacts
on the data cable.

*******

A cardinal rule of OS installation is:

Â*Â*Â* Always unplug *all* the other hard drives before installing an OS.

Â*Â*Â* Then, the OS install can only "damage" the disk you think it's
damaging.

So if your intention was to have a Win7 disk, completely
independent of the WinXP disk, you'd unplug the WinXP disk
before installing Win7.

Now, later, if you wanted a "dual boot menu" in your Windows 7,
only one BIOS boot disk setting, you would then use "EasyBCD" to
add the second OS. You would point the BIOS to the Win7 drive
(with dual boot BCD entries), and either OS could be launched
from there.

If the Win7 drive dies, yes, the BCD on its drive is lost.
But the boot.ini on the WinXP C: drive was never removed, and
should work.

In fact, I'm having trouble imaging how this happened, as
it's really pretty hard to foul up that setup. It would hav
taken the Windows 7 install putting System Reserved on the
WinXP drive, to ruin it. That's about the only way I know
of to ruin it.

*******

OK, let's discuss fixing it.

You will always need some sort of tools to do the fixes with.

A WinXP installer CD is one possible tool, and it has a couple
of things that are harder to find elsewhere.

https://s10.postimg.org/8465fhoix/winxp_install_cd.gif


| -- MBR --------| ---------------- C: --------------------|
| Boot | Partition | PartitionÂ*Â*Â*Â* boot.iniÂ* rest of WinXP C:Â* |
| Code | TableÂ*Â*Â*Â* | Boot RecordÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* |

Â*Â*Â* ^Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* ^Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* ^Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* ^
Â*Â*Â* |Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* |Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* |Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* |
Â* "fixmbr"Â*Â* |Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* "fixboot"Â*Â*Â*Â* "more C:\boot.ini"
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* SetÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* (to read this file)
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Active
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Flag on
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* C: partition
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* "diskpart"???

For "fixmbr" and "Fixboot", you'll need your WinXP installer CD.
Find the recipe for getting into repair mode. You will be prompted
for the administrator password. The target partitions are numbered.
You'll be typing "1" to select the only partition with winXP on it,
then entering the Administrator password.

Once there, you run "fixmbr" to repair the tiny fraction
of a sector of boot code on the MBR.

You enter "fixboot" to repair the PBR, where the PBR is
as much as 1536 bytes of information or so. It'll probably
ask to confirm that you want that on C: .

The "diskpart" one, looks pretty easy.

diskpart
list diskÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # only one disk called disk 0
select disk 0Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # select the only disk in the menu
list partitionÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # The partition size is your hint of
your C:
select partition 1Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # My first partition is WinXP
detail partitionÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # How you find out stuff, with
"detail" option

Partition 1
TypeÂ*Â* : 07
Hidden : No
Active : NoÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* === Oops, OK, we need to fix this

ActiveÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Â* # This makes the currently selected
partition
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # the active one

detail partitionÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* # now we check it again

Partition 1
TypeÂ*Â* : 07
Hidden : No
Active : YesÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* === OK, C: is ready to boot (or close
to it)

exitÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Â*Â* # All done

*******

To edit the boot.ini is going to be more of a challenge.
I would avoid the following section entirely, and just
try and boot the WinXP drive after the above have been
applied. If it still won't boot, you can work on it.

Editing the boot.ini really should not be necessary at all,
first of all.

The "ARC" should point at the partition we were working on
in the diskpart step. You can see my boot.ini is pointed at
Disk 0 and Partition 1, just like diskpart.

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn /PAE
C:\ = "WINXPNEW 1TB drive"

To access boot.ini , I'm not being offered an editor on my
WinXP CD. I can do this:

Â*Â*Â* help
Â*Â*Â* more C:\boot.ini

and at least review the text to see it's sane.

It's generally not recommended to use things like "bootcfg"
or other automations of that type. If you had some customization,
it might remove it. Best practice is to save a copy of your
existing file for later, if you do want to experiment.

Â*Â*Â* copy boot.ini boot.ini.bak

Now you can mess around if you want.

You may be able to slave the WinXP drive to another
Windows machine, and work on the boot.ini there. Just
remember boot.ini has "Hidden" and "System" attributes, which
may require the usage of "attrib" command to modify
and de-fuse. Attrib can be used to temporarily turn off
attributes, making further access or listing possible.

Â*Â*Â* help attrib

*******

The above answer assumes the Win7 drive is the one that died,
and the WinXP drive remains. Make sure the IDE jumpers are set
properly, before going to all the trouble of booting the WinXP
installer CD. It boots pretty slow and is annoying. I use
"fixboot" all the time here, when "housecleaning" my WinXP partition
and am now very familiar with the lengthy boot. And yes, my other
drives are unplugged while I work on it :-) Then, the login
prompt only has 1 partition on offer, so I cannot go wrong.

HTH,
Â*Â*Â* Paul

Thanks for the information.Â* Just when I thought the drive might be
shot, I hooked it up with a USB-SATA adapter and it seems to be
working normally, so not sure what to do next.

By the way, it is the XP drive that went bad and not the Win 7 drive.
One of the earlier repliers actually had this right from the start
and I didn't.Â* However, I'm not even sure if the drive is bad now
since it seems to be working with the adapter.Â* I'm wondering if
there's a way to be sure?Â* I'll keep it coupled to the laptop this
way and run some recommended tests.

At one point when I was trying to boot up with it in the desktop
configuration, I got a blue screen that said something about a
pci.sys error.Â* I've been wondering for a while if adding a USB 3
card to my desktop caused problems.Â* My desktop would also randomly
reboot for no reason.Â* At first I thought memory but Memtest revealed
no problems after running overnight.Â* I've since removed the USB 3
card as next possible suspect, assuming this drive *really is* ok.
I'm wondering if the USB 3 card could cause issues even if it was
working correctly??Â* I got it in order to do faster backups, which it
did well.

Thanks,
JBI

Ok, while I was waiting for recommendations, I found this page:

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/hard-disk-drive-health

While I had the drive hooked up in Win 7 with the USB-SATA adapter, I
ran WMIC and it reported "OK" status.Â* To be sure, since it didn't
specify which of the three drives in the system were ok (just three
ok's), I disconnected the USB drive and it simply reported two ok's.

Â*From this I assume the drive is ok then?

I don't think there is S.M.A.R.T. tunneling through USB. SMART
is how you get a quick indication of drive health.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

The drive should be connected to a *SATA* port, then check the health.
SMART works over SATA or IDE, not USB as far as I know.

The free version of HDTune has a "Health" tab and you can look
at that for the "Reallocated" raw data field. It should be zero,
under normal conditions. This program is 10 years old now. It's
not the trial version - this one is perfectly free.

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

The hard drive "temperature" is delivered via SMART, so if HDTune
shows a temperature, that's generally a good sign. If the temperature
isn't shown, then SMART might not be available over the hardware path
being used.

*******

Seagate and Western Digital (wdc.com) have diagnostic programs
for their drives. They will show a "code" if the drive is bad.
They will say the drive "passed" if it is good. You can use
tests like that for more info.

So, you have two drives. One is questionable. The other one boots ?
I got the impression you had a broken drive and a non-booting
drive.

What's your inventory now ?

Macrium Reflect Free emergency boot CD, has a "boot repair" menu
item, which is good for Vista+ problems. But I wouldn't reach for
that yet, because the root cause of your failure is unknown.
Doing a lot of writes to the drive, might not actually
be a good idea, depending on what is broken.

Checking the health is probably a start, but won't provide
all the answers.

I use the "Boot Repair" on Macrium, after some other boot-related
thing has fouled up.

If the disk is corrupted, it might even be dangerous to use CHKDSK
(in its repair mode). Some partitions have been absolutely
destroyed by CHKDSK, which is why it's regarded as a
"good/bad" tool. It's good when it fixes stuff,
and bad when it destroys stuff. That's why is has to be
used with a good deal of skepticism. If I have concerns
that the hardware itself is bad, I concentrate on doing
a backup first. The gddrescue package on Linux (GNU
ddrescue) can make backups, when other utilities refuse to
do it.

Â*Â* Paul

I hooked the drive back up to the desktop. While booting, I pressed F8
and then chose last good config. It booted right into the Win7 drive.
I exited and rebooted and then the screen came up for choice between the
two drives (Win7 and XP). Choosing XP, there seems to be an attempt,
but then I get either blue screen or missing files.

I think that since I now am able to boot to the Win 7 drive now, I'll
use it to run tests on the XP, since the XP drive is now hooked up again
via the SATA cable. Since the WMIC didn't apparently work by USB as you
kindly pointed out, I'll have to use some other tools in Win 7 now to
check health of the XP drive.

Sorry, I've been all over the place, but I've been trying a lot of
things trying to get the drive to boot up. If it really turns out to be
bad, all is not lost except I'd be out the $ for a suitable 1 TB
replacement. I do have a back up that's a year old, but I haven't used
the desktop in a year so nothing is lost. I'm just trying to rule out
the drive's status for sure before investing in a new one.

On Sat, 10 Mar 2018 11:52:19 -0500, JBI wrote:

Ok, while I was waiting for recommendations, I found this page:

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/hard-disk-drive-health

While I had the drive hooked up in Win 7 with the USB-SATA adapter, I
ran WMIC and it reported "OK" status. To be sure, since it didn't
specify which of the three drives in the system were ok (just three
ok's), I disconnected the USB drive and it simply reported two ok's.

From this I assume the drive is ok then?


I'm not in favor of top posting, but the standard argument against
bottom-posting is that nobody wants to have to scroll way down a
message to see what you've posted.

My standard reply to that argument is that the culprit is not
bottom-posting, it's the lack of appropriate trimming of the quoted
post. You should *always* trim of enough of what you quote so that all
that remains is enough to put your reply into perspective. You don't
do that, and as a result your replies are very hard to read. Like
those who argue against bottom-posting, *I* don't want to have to
scroll way down a message to see what you've posted.

On 03/10/2018 12:22 PM, Paul wrote:
JBI wrote:
On 03/10/2018 11:31 AM, JBI wrote:
On 03/09/2018 11:34 PM, Paul wrote:
JBI wrote:
I've been using a Win 7/ XP dual boot configuration with each OS on
a different hard drive.Â* I select at boot up which OS to go into.
Now, one drive has gone bad (unable to read/ write).Â* I removed it,
but now I get a message about selecting proper drive to boot or
insert a boot disk at startup.Â* I tried reselecting the remaining
drive in the BIOS and the boot up menu and I still get the same
message.Â* This is for my drive with XP that I used singly for years
before I reconfigured to dual boot.Â* My guess is that when I added
the drive with Win 7 on it, I must have placed the dual boot
program on there also.Â* How can I now get the XP drive to boot the
way it used to by itself?Â* Thanks.



The first questions are physical.

I don't need to ask any questions, if your two drives are SATA.

If the two drives are IDE, they could be sharing a cable,
they could be master/slave/cable_select. If you remove
a drive from a two-drive cable setup, you *may* need to
correct the jumpers.

Please indicate whether you need info on how to set up
IDE drives. IDE is the "wide ribbon cable" thing. SATA
by comparison, is the narrow red one, with only seven contacts
on the data cable.

*******

A cardinal rule of OS installation is:

Â*Â*Â* Always unplug *all* the other hard drives before installing an OS.

Â*Â*Â* Then, the OS install can only "damage" the disk you think it's
damaging.

So if your intention was to have a Win7 disk, completely
independent of the WinXP disk, you'd unplug the WinXP disk
before installing Win7.

Now, later, if you wanted a "dual boot menu" in your Windows 7,
only one BIOS boot disk setting, you would then use "EasyBCD" to
add the second OS. You would point the BIOS to the Win7 drive
(with dual boot BCD entries), and either OS could be launched
from there.

If the Win7 drive dies, yes, the BCD on its drive is lost.
But the boot.ini on the WinXP C: drive was never removed, and
should work.

In fact, I'm having trouble imaging how this happened, as
it's really pretty hard to foul up that setup. It would hav
taken the Windows 7 install putting System Reserved on the
WinXP drive, to ruin it. That's about the only way I know
of to ruin it.

*******

OK, let's discuss fixing it.

You will always need some sort of tools to do the fixes with.

A WinXP installer CD is one possible tool, and it has a couple
of things that are harder to find elsewhere.

https://s10.postimg.org/8465fhoix/winxp_install_cd.gif


| -- MBR --------| ---------------- C: --------------------|
| Boot | Partition | PartitionÂ*Â*Â*Â* boot.iniÂ* rest of WinXP C:Â* |
| Code | TableÂ*Â*Â*Â* | Boot RecordÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* |

Â*Â*Â* ^Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* ^Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* ^Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* ^
Â*Â*Â* |Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* |Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* |Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* |
Â* "fixmbr"Â*Â* |Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* "fixboot"Â*Â*Â*Â* "more C:\boot.ini"
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* SetÂ*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* (to read this file)
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Active
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Flag on
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* C: partition
Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* "diskpart"???

For "fixmbr" and "Fixboot", you'll need your WinXP installer CD.
Find the recipe for getting into repair mode. You will be prompted
for the administrator password. The target partitions are numbered.
You'll be typing "1" to select the only partition with winXP on it,
then entering the Administrator password.

Once there, you run "fixmbr" to repair the tiny fraction
of a sector of boot code on the MBR.

You enter "fixboot" to repair the PBR, where the PBR is
as much as 1536 bytes of information or so. It'll probably
ask to confirm that you want that on C: .

I was going to try this, but it wouldn't let me get passed the
password. I don't have a clue as to what it is. It's nothing I ever
saved. I tried standard "admin" "administrator" "password" and even
nothing and after 3 times, it would reboot.


The drive should be connected to a *SATA* port, then check the health.
SMART works over SATA or IDE, not USB as far as I know.

The free version of HDTune has a "Health" tab and you can look
at that for the "Reallocated" raw data field. It should be zero,
under normal conditions. This program is 10 years old now. It's
not the trial version - this one is perfectly free.

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

The hard drive "temperature" is delivered via SMART, so if HDTune
shows a temperature, that's generally a good sign. If the temperature
isn't shown, then SMART might not be available over the hardware path
being used.

Now I have Win 7 booted up and I am currently running it's scandisc/
defragment/ auto repair tools on the XP drive. I'll also take a look at
HDTune and see what it says.


*******

Seagate and Western Digital (wdc.com) have diagnostic programs
for their drives. They will show a "code" if the drive is bad.
They will say the drive "passed" if it is good. You can use
tests like that for more info.

So, you have two drives. One is questionable. The other one boots ?
I got the impression you had a broken drive and a non-booting
drive.

What's your inventory now ?

Macrium Reflect Free emergency boot CD, has a "boot repair" menu
item, which is good for Vista+ problems. But I wouldn't reach for
that yet, because the root cause of your failure is unknown.
Doing a lot of writes to the drive, might not actually
be a good idea, depending on what is broken.

Checking the health is probably a start, but won't provide
all the answers.

I use the "Boot Repair" on Macrium, after some other boot-related
thing has fouled up.

If the disk is corrupted, it might even be dangerous to use CHKDSK
(in its repair mode). Some partitions have been absolutely
destroyed by CHKDSK, which is why it's regarded as a
"good/bad" tool. It's good when it fixes stuff,
and bad when it destroys stuff. That's why is has to be
used with a good deal of skepticism. If I have concerns
that the hardware itself is bad, I concentrate on doing
a backup first. The gddrescue package on Linux (GNU
ddrescue) can make backups, when other utilities refuse to
do it.

I'll look at Macrium boot repair option since I can't get past the
password thing with the XP CD.


Â*Â* Paul

JBI wrote:


I was going to try this, but it wouldn't let me get passed the
password. I don't have a clue as to what it is. It's nothing I ever
saved. I tried standard "admin" "administrator" "password" and even
nothing and after 3 times, it would reboot.

https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/wi...gistry-editor/

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Revers...s_XP_Passwords

Reset capability - this involves the least effort, but
the tools are kinda command line looking :-) I didn't really
want to crush the password on my test VM. I like to play around,
so I'll be testing my hand at rainbow tables.

http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

********

On the other side of the spectrum is cracking.

Dump to standard format. It's too bad I didn't see tools
like this in the regular package manager, which would
have saved a trip here.

https://tools.kali.org/password-attacks/creddump

(Click the file manager, click the "volume" which may or may not
be labeled well enough to say it is your WinXP partition, click
it and see.)

df === gives mount table info
=== my test WinXP mount shows a string of
digits for the partition name


cd /media/root/digits/WINDOWS/system32/config

pwdump system SAM === case-sensitive reg names
=== UID = 0x1F4 = 500 = Admin account

aad3b435b51404eeaad3b435b51404ee : fc525c9683e8fe067095ba2ddc971889
^ ^
| |
username:uid:LM-hash : NTLM-hash:comment:homedir: (This is a PWDump Format)

I tried this. It refused to crack my "fc..." thing.

http://www.objectif-securite.ch/en/ophcrack.php

Testing the process, I tried entering a known password into the hash generator
That's to verify I really know what the password is that I'm
trying to crack and calibrating the process. If the web cracker
isn't set up to use the full set of WinXP tables, that might
account for it not giving a result.

Passw0rd! == fc525c9683e8fe067095ba2ddc971889

Entering fc525c9683e8fe067095ba2ddc971889 into the box above it

"Enter your NTHash here"

fc525c9683e8fe067095ba2ddc971889 == Cracking result: Password not found

Using the Kali DVD, it will take the XP Special table set (7.5GB)
to crack my (Microsoft-provided) VM "Passw0rd!" password using ophcrack
on the DVD. I shouldn't need the German tables with umlaut and
friends in the character set. So I don't need a 15GB torrent.
Just downloading the other half of it should be enough.

The XP table set handles up to 14 characters. There are several
sets of tables. The company offering them "objectif",
makes money from selling media with table-sets on it. The
XP Special table is only 96% effective, so it's not nearly as complete
as the "punctuation free" tables which are much smaller. This is
why it's important to put "!" in your password.

Anyway, if you know for a fact the administrator password
is not critical to operating your computer room, you
could find a pwdump utility and dump your password to be
cracked in pwdump format.

The pwdump utility on the Kali DVD is actually a copy
of creddump. I guess they renamed it for the LOLs.

Using pwdump just puts the info in a standard format. The
cracking tools may or may not accept pwdump format, so while it
was a start at a standard, right away the objectif web site
insisted I only needed to enter 32 characters to be cracked.

It will take me a while to download the tables. If you
can post your pwdump, I can run it through while this
**** is booted :-) (It's going on the Test Machine when
I get all the materials gathered. It will probably take
at least another two hours of downloads.) I will be
trying to crack fc525c9683e8fe067095ba2ddc971889 for
my test.

If you need an alternate location to download Kali, you
can try here.

http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/kali-images/

Paul

Paul wrote:
JBI wrote:


I was going to try this, but it wouldn't let me get passed the
password. I don't have a clue as to what it is. It's nothing I ever
saved. I tried standard "admin" "administrator" "password" and even
nothing and after 3 times, it would reboot.

Using Ophcrack, I could crack one test password "mullet"
OK, but the standard Microsoft password "Passw0rd!" was
not cracked. That's an example of an uppercase, lowercase,
digit, punctuation - containing password. That requires
the XP Special table to crack it (which has a 96% probability
of success, and failed in this case).

https://s10.postimg.org/inc44a315/ophcrack_on_kali.gif

Paul

On 03/11/2018 08:52 AM, Paul wrote:
Paul wrote:
JBI wrote:


Â*I was going to try this, but it wouldn't let me get passed the
password.Â* I don't have a clue as to what it is.Â* It's nothing I ever
saved.Â* I tried standard "admin" "administrator" "password" and even
nothing and after 3 times, it would reboot.

Using Ophcrack, I could crack one test password "mullet"
OK, but the standard Microsoft password "Passw0rd!" was
not cracked. That's an example of an uppercase, lowercase,
digit, punctuation - containing password. That requires
the XP Special table to crack it (which has a 96% probability
of success, and failed in this case).

https://s10.postimg.org/inc44a315/ophcrack_on_kali.gif

Â*Â* Paul

Thanks for the information with both of these posts! Unfortunately,
last night, after a lot of trial and error, I went for the backup, but
found this morning that it didn't restore, not due to a bad back up
image, but bad hard drive. Telltale sign it's time to get a new hard
drive.

JBI wrote:
On 03/11/2018 08:52 AM, Paul wrote:
Paul wrote:
JBI wrote:


I was going to try this, but it wouldn't let me get passed the
password. I don't have a clue as to what it is. It's nothing I
ever saved. I tried standard "admin" "administrator" "password" and
even nothing and after 3 times, it would reboot.

Using Ophcrack, I could crack one test password "mullet"
OK, but the standard Microsoft password "Passw0rd!" was
not cracked. That's an example of an uppercase, lowercase,
digit, punctuation - containing password. That requires
the XP Special table to crack it (which has a 96% probability
of success, and failed in this case).

https://s10.postimg.org/inc44a315/ophcrack_on_kali.gif

Paul

Thanks for the information with both of these posts! Unfortunately,
last night, after a lot of trial and error, I went for the backup, but
found this morning that it didn't restore, not due to a bad back up
image, but bad hard drive. Telltale sign it's time to get a new hard
drive.

Well, I was just having a little fun. I've never "cracked"
a password before :-) Now I will need some more passwords to crack.

Paul

On 03/11/2018 10:45 AM, Paul wrote:
JBI wrote:
On 03/11/2018 08:52 AM, Paul wrote:
Paul wrote:
JBI wrote:


Â*I was going to try this, but it wouldn't let me get passed the
password.Â* I don't have a clue as to what it is.Â* It's nothing I
ever saved.Â* I tried standard "admin" "administrator" "password"
and even nothing and after 3 times, it would reboot.

Using Ophcrack, I could crack one test password "mullet"
OK, but the standard Microsoft password "Passw0rd!" was
not cracked. That's an example of an uppercase, lowercase,
digit, punctuation - containing password. That requires
the XP Special table to crack it (which has a 96% probability
of success, and failed in this case).

https://s10.postimg.org/inc44a315/ophcrack_on_kali.gif

Â*Â*Â* Paul

Thanks for the information with both of these posts!Â* Unfortunately,
last night, after a lot of trial and error, I went for the backup, but
found this morning that it didn't restore, not due to a bad back up
image, but bad hard drive.Â* Telltale sign it's time to get a new hard
drive.

Well, I was just having a little fun. I've never "cracked"
a password before :-) Now I will need some more passwords to crack.

Â*Â* Paul

You know what, I've been foiled again! These darn PC's. I DO now have
it working, on the original drive! Here's what happened:

1) I first tried restoring an image from Clonezilla, my standard back up
tool. It failed to restore the back up to the suspected drive, so I
assumed the drive was faulty. Then, just for kicks....

2) I discovered I had another back up, apparently made at the same time,
but using True Image. I popped in the True Image CD, chose the True
Image of the XP drive, and, to my surprise, the image was restored and
is now working!

I'm not sure why Conezilla failed and why TI worked.

For now, I have the XP system up and running on the "suspected" drive
and I went into the F8 menu and disabled reboot in event of system
failure. I suspect the reason the drive had become corrupted was
because the system was randomly rebooting and I'm still not sure why. I
switched out the power supply for a different one, ran Memtest several
times, and had removed one or more suspected cards. It's possible the
drive or OS had already become too corrupted by the time I removed the
offending card and was causing random reboot anyway, not sure.

Now that it's up and running, I'm going to try analyzing the drive using
some of the tools you recommended plus just leave it run while it does
tasks to see if I can (hopefully) get the BSOD to pop up instead of
rebooting to find out for sure what's happening.