Windows xp booting from wrong drive

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England and Wales company registration number Today at AM. Yesterday at PM. Monday at PM. Friday at AM. Jan 6, Question Windows won't boot, need help decipher Boot Repair Report? Jan 5, Jan 4, Question My device keep booting from the wrong HDD if i do a restart. I will say that the Recovery Console should help you. It's on your Windows XP install disk and here is a link to the commands. I've managed to delete the other partition and get it back to just the C drive.

However, I have a new problem now. XP doesn't boot; I had a message on startup relating to ntldr, which after a bit of googling I fixed by copying some files from the xp disc using recovery console. Now, the flashing underscore that appears before the windows loading screen initialises is all that appears, and the hard drive light flickers constantly.

It's clearly trying to load XP, but it can't seem to do it, and none of the recovery console commands have made a difference. Also, I have to select the hard drive to boot from on startup, or it simply skips it and tries to boot from the other devices DVD drive, etc. Me thinks the boot sector is messed up. I don't have any experience with your problem.

When confronted with something like this I usually repartition, reformat and reinstall. That's the easy way for me. I don't usually have files I can't afford to lose, and if I do I back them up to a second computer. You on the otherhand my be in a different position. I don't know. I've backed up everything I need, so it may be best if I do a fresh install like you suggested. When Windows XP encounters a fatal error, the default setting for handling such an error is to automatically reboot the system.

If the error occurs while Windows XP is booting, the operating system will become stuck in a reboot cycle--rebooting over and over instead of starting up normally. In that case, you'll need to disable the option for automatically restarting on system failure. When Windows XP begins to boot up and you see the message Please select the operating system to start or hear the single beep, press [F8] to display the Windows Advanced Options Menu.

Now, Windows XP will hang up when it encounters the error and with any luck, it will display a stop message you can use to diagnose the problem. If you can't seem to repair a Windows XP system that won't boot and you have a recent backup, you can restore the system from the backup media. The method you use to restore the system will depend on what backup utility you used, so you'll need to follow the utility's instructions on how to perform a restore operation.

If you can't repair a Windows XP system that won't boot and you don't have a recent backup, you can perform an in-place upgrade. Doing so reinstalls the operating system into the same folder, just as if you were upgrading from one version of Windows to another. An in-place upgrade will usually solve most, if not all, Windows boot problems.

This screen will prompt you to press R to repair the selected installation or to press [Esc] to install a fresh copy of Windows XP. In this case, initiating a repair operation is synonymous with performing an in-place upgrade, so you'll need to press R. When you do so, Setup will examine the disk drives in the system.

It will then begin performing the in-place upgrade. Keep in mind that after you perform an in-place upgrade or repair installation, you must reinstall all updates to Windows. Details required :. Cancel Submit. How satisfied are you with this reply? Thanks for your feedback, it helps us improve the site.

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