Vista Xp Dual boot problem

[melhoff13]

Folks,

I have a problem. I had XP and Vista dual booted on my desktop. XP was on my main HD and Vista was on the second HD. My main HD went out and is fried. I installed a new HD, but now the system will not load with the new HD. I have to take the new HD out and replace it with the old HD to get vista to boot. With the new HD in, the system will not boot at all. I know it has something to do with the dual boot settings, but I do not know how to fix this. I do not plan on putting XP on the new drive, I just want it for storage (no more dual booting for me). If anyone has ideas please let me know. Thanks in advance!

[Middge]

Well the reason you can't boot vista without the original hard drive is because the boot info file is located on that hard drive. There are 2 potential fixes for your problem.
A)Copy the boot.ini info off the boot sector of the original hard drive to the new hard drive. (This is generally a bad idea if u dont plan to dual boot anymore)

B)change the jumpers on the hard drive with vista on it to primary master so it becomes ur primary hard drive. That should cause ur system to boot off that drive without going through the dual boot menu. If you do that you have to change the jumperrs on your new hard drive to match where your vista hard drive was.