Drive Configuration

[magneto_ms]

I am trying to format a friends computer which has 2 separate hard drives each having a single partition.

On drive C: he had windows 98 installed
and on D: Win XP.

The task was to do a clean format on both the drives and just do with a single XP OS on drive D. So I went on about it by doing a fresh install of Win XP on drive D and then after booting in on XP I tried to format the C: drive which had 98 installed. It did not allow me to do so saying, I couldn't format a system partition. I put in the XP CD again and deleted the the C: drive partition and created it again in the hope of taking out the Win 98 installation that still seemed to be showing up on it. The C: drive then began to show up as New (Raw) but unfortunately the system would not boot up again and threw out an error saying no device found or insert cd rom to boot (sorry, do not remember the exact wording there). This happened even after I changed the boot device priority to D:,C:, and CD rom.

Why is it happening?

The only way out I found was to install XP again on C drive and now the system has Win XP on both C: and D: drive. But quite surprisingly it no longer asks which OS to boot from. Automatically takes up the XP on C: drive.

Is it because the C: drive is the master here? In that case, will it be all right if I just format D: drive from C:? (I haven't tried that yet.) I just need a single OS here.

Any advice is welcome...

Thanks...

[unidentified]

If you have already done enough of formatting and installing of the OS on both drives, then try once more to format both drives and set Windows XP on C: and completely format D: if there are no data's on it so that there wouldn't be any glitches afterwards or else its just fine for you to delete the D: manually after bootup.

[johnson22]

Hope this guide helps you : How to resolve the error "Disk boot failure"