Reinstalling windows help

[Doulton]

Hi, I have a few questions regarding installing windows and getting it to work on the drive we want.
Our computer has one hard drive that is partitioned into C and D drives. Several months ago the D drive started fucking up, so that information on it could often not be read and would be lost. So after several wipes and formats we gave up on it and no longer use it. I have an extra hard drive which we now want to be the main drive, with windows on it. So we formatted this second drive, and while it was set to slave mode, with the original drive set to master, we installed windows 2000 on it (the second drive) while running windows 2000 from the original drive. We then deleted windows from the original drive, just to confirm that the windows that we are now using is running from the second drive.
But then it got really strange. I set the drive that should now be running windows to master and the original drive to slave, and windows will not start. It says that something is missing and it cannot start. As best as I can recall it is something like "NTSDR". I tried unplugging the original drive, and the same thing happened. I tried every combination for slave and master, and still it won't work. The only way it will start is with the original drive (the one that is paritioned into C and D, with no vital files on D and everything deleted from C) set to master, and the second drive, which should be the only one that has any windows files on it, set to slave.
Can anyone tell us what the hell is going on? This seems very weird. There should be no windows files at all on the original drive, and yet windows will not start unless this drive is set to master. I'm not terribly adept with computers (I think this is the first time I've ever installed windows, although my girlfriend has done it many times). My only guess is that somehow vital files were put on the original drive when we installed windows on the second drive, through windows running on the original drive.
What we want is to be able to get windows running on just the second drive, independant of the original drive. The original drive may be on its last legs and we don't want to have to rely on it at all.
Any advice will be greatly appreciated, thanks.

 

[HornyHenry]

Try this

You would get more serious responses in the How To forum, but try this:
Edit your boot.ini file in the root of the second drive. Example:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\W2KPROHO="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Server_Home" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\W2KSVOCC="Microsoft Windows 2000 Server_OCC" /fastdetect

Where it says disk(0), yours probably says (1)? Edit it to make the partition you want to boot disk (0)

Of course, then move the drive back to master.

 

[HornyHenry]

Did this work?

WOndering if my advice was good or not.

 

[uprocessor01]

my 2 cents

i need clarrification. you had the original drive which had a partition for c and d. One physical drive divided into logical 2 drives (c and d). i will assume that the computer booted from the c logical drive.

and you have another hard drive just laying around somewhere.

do i understand so far?

 

[BobJones69]

What has happened is that you have deleted the master boot record from the primary drive. In english what it means is that the computer, in order to boot, loads what is called the "master boot record" (MBR) which tells it which drive to load from and had your boot menu and so on.

This will ALWAYS be located on whatever drive you set to be the "active" drive (you can use a dos util called "fdisk" to see which drive this is but it is usually the first drive). Since you deleted the primary drive (which was also the active drive), you deleted the MBR so the operating system on the second drive can no longer be reached.

To fix it refer to this link
http://www.ntfs.com/mbr-damaged.htm

Hope that helps. Ps your second drive has NOT been damaged in any way. The MBR is generic and can be regenerated without deleting anything.

Bob

 

[BobJones69]

Oh and if that doesnt work, just try changing your active partition (using fdisk)