master boot record

[ssahl]

Is there a way to copy the master boot record to another hard disk (the one that actually has the OS on it)

[Statica]

What issue are you trying to correct here? The MBR contains very specific information about the drive and will usually be of no use on another one. Have you considered repairing the OS to recreate an MBR?

[ssahl]

Well, this is the deal, after making a few upgrades up to PCI-E system I didnt reload the OS, I just put the old 7200rpm hard drive on the new motherboard/system, but it had a few issues, but still ran. I bought a new 10,000rpm sata drive and did a fresh install of winXP as a dual boot setup, I totally forgot that the master boot file was on the other drive, until I took it out and my system wouldnt boot. Good thing I didnt format the drive, but not only was I wanting to use the first drive in another computer, but I was also thinking my boot up time would be a lot faster if it was reading the boot files from the 10,000rpm hard drive. what else exactly would using repair do aside from recreating the MBR?

[Statica]

Make sure you know the password of the Administrator account (if you haven't set one it is usually blank, but it is recommended you set an (post back here if you need instructions on how to do it)
1) Set the 10,000 rpm drive as the C drive (single drive setup).
2) Then boot with the XP CD in your optical drive and your boot order set to start the CD first.
3) From the first set of options select R to repair an existing XP installation .. select single OS (not dual) & enter the admin password
4) now all you need to do is type:
fixmbr

That should get your OS booting from the 10000 rpm drive. You can connect the old drive back.

[ssahl]

ok, I can boot into safe mode and double check the admin password
as for setting the 10000rpm drive letter to C can I just unplug all other drives and then boot from the windows cd, or do I have to actually go into disk management and change it there?

[ssahl]

what about the normal files on a boot drive?
boot.ini
ntldr
NTDETECT.COM
AUTOEXECT.BAT
config.sys
IO.SYS
msdos.sys

none of those are on the 10000rpm drive (dont know why I never noticed that a long time ago)
should I copy any of those from the other drive, &/or edit the boot.ini file or something?

[liambl]

I think the problems with boot files are related to you setting up a dual boot. In a dual boot, you can only have one set of boot files, which control both OS's. That would explaing the unable to boot when original drive removed and that there were no boot files on the 10k drive.

[ssahl]

I tried that, but it didnt work. I was not able to boot from the 10000rpm drive
I even tried the fixboot command, I did the fixboot /scan first
but it said was unable to find any boot sections
which I dont understand as it was able to see
c:/windows
when I ran the rapair

[ssahl]

I got it working!

The one last thing that I needed to do was make the disk/partition active
then copy the ntldr file and she booted right up