Hi,
I just bought a new hard drive the other day, (Seagate Barracuda 80GB drive) and installed Windows XP on. My computer already has a hard drive on it with a copy of Windows XP. The 1st problem I had was that unless I changed the settings from my BIOS, I could only boot from my old drive. So what I did was install partition magic on my drive and bootmagic. The next problem that I had was that Bootmagic only recognised the copy of Windows XP on my old drive. When I highlighted my new drive, it said unknown OS (Operating System). Ithought nothing of this and rebooted my system. My comuter rebooted and a box came up asking which drive (OS) I wanted to boot from. I selected the new drive. The Windows XP loading screen came up, BUT a few seconds later a message came up saying: " autochk not found, skipping autochk". Then another message appeared saying fatal error, system shutting down.
I rebooted with my old drive and that one booted fine. Can anyone tell me what's going on ? I've got a feeling that it has to do with bootmagic not recognising the OS (although it listed both drives, and both drives as primary)

1. Is there an easier way to install Windows XP on both drives, and boot from whichever drive I want, without having to change the BIOS every time.
or
2. How can I do it using bootmagic


I know that this is a long read, but thank you to anyone who even bothered to read it.

if u set ur old drive as a slave and the new 1 as master tht should work?

Hey,

You could purchase 2 Hard Disk caddies which cost peanuts and then simply swap in and out the hard disk you wish to boot from. You could still have both hard disks in the machine but you would just swap which one was connected to the primary master cable by switching them around.

Example - http://www.lindy.com/uk/catalog/10/08/index.php

For the time being, I've settled for making one drive inaccessible from the other, and for accessing my new drive by disabling the old one from BIOS, that is until I can figure out how to boot them independently !

I have also tried to install XP on two drives and have run into nothing but trouble. Bootmagic has completely screwed my boot process. It now boots from the new (slave) drive (which has no OS) and has forgotten about the original (master). SithLord I would not suggest using bootmagic unless you absolutely know what your doing. I am having to swap drives and install XP Pro on the old (slave) and making it the (master) to hopefully gain access to the original HHD.
What about using Acronis OS selector to access the two different OS's?

why on earth do you want to have windows xp on 2 hard drives? anyway on to your problem, windows xp does not like to be on the slave drive, i've tried adding linux and windows xp and putting windows on the slave. this will just not work, if you want to boot from your new hard drive, you will have to switch the positioning so the new one is the master. That is all you can do, just switch the hard drives like d-a-l said above

Thanks for your comments Coolotter88.

I'm now closing this thread as it's a year old.