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General discussion

accessing 2nd hard drive

by xjmpr Aug 23, 2007 8:38PM PDT

I recentley added a hard drive to my pc. A Dell 4500 series I bought in 2002. My OS is XP HE SP2. 1.8 pros.,640 ram. I can access the new drive ok when I open it from My Computer. I can view the folders. What I want to do is Log on to the new hard drive as I would before I added the new drive. The new drive is loaded with XP. I want to log on using the normal welcome screen and use it in the normal fashion. Is that possible and how is that done? Any help would be greatley appreciated...Thanks

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4 Posts
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Is this what you mean....that both drives have XP?
by Steven Haninger Aug 23, 2007 8:47PM PDT

Are you saying that you have an operating system on both drives? As such, you would need to select the boot drive from your motherboard BIOS. When you log on, you are doing so to an operating system and not to a drive itself. Now, I would be careful if you've installed the same copy of XP using the same product ID on both drives. That might confuse the MS validation process when you go on line to update the OS.

Some clarification is needed here.

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Re: accessing second hard drive.
by Kees Bakker Aug 23, 2007 8:52PM PDT

Two ways to do this:
1. Exchange the connections of this new drive and your old one. Your new drive will be the c:-drive then, your old drive the d:-drive, and your logon, by default, is from your c:-drive.
2. Edit the BOOT.INI file (a hidden file in the root folder of your current c:-drive) to point to the d:-drive to continue booting.

This is the contents of my boot.ini:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Media Center Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

A few useful links for option 2:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022
http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/asm/mbr/bootini.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/information/bootini.mspx

Hope this helps.


Kees

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second hard drive
by xjmpr Aug 23, 2007 8:59PM PDT

Thanks a bunch..Will let you know..Steve

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Kees advice will work too but
by Steven Haninger Aug 23, 2007 10:56PM PDT

will require an extra step. It depends on what your ultimate goal is. Editing the boot.ini will mean that drive will need to be seen first all the time. That's ok...as long as it's working. I jump between XP and Win 2K. To change drives I reboot and press the keyboard key that interrupts the POST. I select the drive I want for that session. No cables or editing of anything needed. Whatever suits your desired purpose in the simplest fashion is the way to go. Again, be wary of installing the same XP disk on two drives even if in the same PC.

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