winme boot

[MrNasty567]

i was watching mallrats and was near the end(irrelevant information) when my slave drive(its worthless and ancient) starts, well, being loud, it makes the usual hard drive noise only its insanely loud, and therefore I have given up on it and am just going to trash it, however ive got a dilemma, windows wont boot up without that drive, it had my swapfile on it but i moved it to my main drive but it still wont even get past the "gateway" screen on bootup so how do i get windows to boot without my slave(which is entirely empty)

[Markoman01027]

Welcome MrNasty,

Great movie..

Jumper your current hard drive with the OS to MASTER or SINGLE. Make sure you use a ATA 100 RIBBON CABLE.

[MrNasty567]

i formatted the disk and got windows to run without it but it takes like five minutes to get past the "gateway" screen on startup. also ive found a new problem(unrelated to the harddrive), something went wrong with my registry and now my computer doesnt open up the explorer on startup, the comp tells me to run scanreg but that cant be used in dos, i really dont want to restart, any ideas?

[MrNasty567]

ive discovered the problem, the registry is gone(according to windows), ive figured out that much because i got win98 to work on my slave drive, also what i meant about that last line in my last post was that i dont want to reinstall windows, which, now that i think about it, i cant do anyway, my system restore disk doesnt work with all of the upgrades that ive put on my comp, i need some replies, im in a nasty situation

[GaryRouth]

You were saying that WindowsME won't boot since the trouble with the slave drive began? How did you manage to change the swap file to your master drive? --> Can you boot into Safe Mode? If so: Take a look and see if Gateway copied the system cab files to the C:\Windows\Options\Cabs folder: you might be able to do an "over the top" reinstall from those files. If you can't boot into Safe mode, do you have a WinMe startup disk/diskette? Boot with that & try your reinstall: but remember to choose C:\Windows as the destination folder, instead of the default C:\Windows000 (or something like that - it's been a while)

It would probably worth your while to run disk diagnostics on both drives (your data will be safe: diagnostics don't change things, just inspect). Download the diagnostics from the manufacture's website (Data LifeGuard for Western Digital, SeaTools for Seagates, Powermax for Maxtors, etc). The downloads will create a bootable floppy. You boot the computer with it (it's often DR-DOS) and run the diagnostics from there.

Let me know if this doesn't help
. . . Gary