Hello, I changed my isp and decided to format my hard drives. I formatted the master, then done the same with my slave drive. When I boot up it doesnt boot from the master but gives me the choice of microsoft home edition (twice.) I have worked out that the 2nd choice is the master. How can I get the pc to boot straight from the master? Should I have done something different when formatting the slave drive? As it seems I have two operating systems on 2 hard drives. Also my floopy drive has stopped working. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

Welcome to PCHF.

1. Check your BIOS to see if the floppy drive is listed.
If not, recommend resetting the BIOS to factory standards.
If the floppy is listed, make it your first boot drive. Make your Master HDD your second boot drive.
2. Bootup with your Master HDD.
3. Reformat your slave HDD from within Windows.

Good Luck...

start run type msconfig click boot ini and check boot paths if it does not say there is an error you have 2 installs of windows

if the above is the result right click my comp select properties select advanced start up and recover then you have 2 options.

1 select edit and remove the line relating to the option to do not use

2 set the second entry as master and reduce the time to choose down to 1 second.

If you do have 2 installs of xp do not format the drive with xp on you do not want as there is a chance seeing as it is default OS that the mbr could be set there and reformatting will create problems instead if you want to get rid just delete the files on the drive leaving it as is as far as format goes and then remove the entry as per option 1


If you do this wrong then your system may not boot to windows so care needs to be taken and I accept no blame