silly problem

[tjhva]

Here is my problem:

I built my system then naturally installed XP, and it installed fine - but I forgot to format my brand new secondary hard drive before I installed windows.

So after XP is up and running I realize this, and the only solution at the time I can think of is to pop back the XP cd in and format the secondary hard drive. The dilemma is that the second time around the XP install considered it a normal install - and not just a format and formatted it with all the necessary master boot record information. Which pretty much created a situation for me to dual boot XP off two different hard drives.

So now after reformatting the secondary drive in XP - during boot up it still shows the selection of which XP to choose for booting. And of course one does not work – but it tries automatically every time to boot from the first.

And for lack of brevity - How can I format my secondary hard drives master boot record so the 'dual XP boot' will go away?

 

[dmroeder]

So you have 1 hard drive with windows on it and you want 1 for storing data on, is that correct?

If that's so, go into the control panel and open up 'Administrative Tools'. Then in there, open up 'Computer Management'. Now on the tree on the left side, select 'Disk Management'. From there, you can format your new drive. Is that what you were after, or did I misunderstand your post?

 

[tjhva]

since my second harddrive was brand new, I could not format it under windows - even though it was showing up in device manager.

and since I do not own a floppy anymore to boot from DOS to fdisk it, I popped back in the XP CD to format it from the first XP install screen.

After doing that to brand new secondary HDD, windows assumed I wanted to fully instally windows again - so It installed the Master Boot Record information when it formated the drive

So now I need to know how to format the Master Boot Record off the drive in XP, or is the only option to hunt down a floppy drive and boot into 'DOS'?

 

[dmroeder]

I was not talking about device manager, I was talking about disk manager. They are two different things. I'm pretty sure that you could have formatted it the way I suggested in my previouse post

 

[Zoron]

Right-click on 'My Computer', then select 'Manage' from the menu.

Go down to disk management. From there, you can create partitions and then format them. You do NOT need to boot from the XP CD to do this. Disk managment may ask you to mark new drives not yet partitioned as usuable in disk manager... just say yes and you should be good to go.