Make a hard drive bootable?

[dwn]

Anyone know how to make a hard drive bootable in Windows XP Pro?

When I first formated it, there was an option to make bootable or just use for storage, I picked the wrong one. Now I set the whole thing up, restored a ghost image to it, copied over all my old data and I'm ready to go as my main drive. But of course now it doesn't boot since it's not a bootable drive. DOH!

So is there a way to fix this without having to reformat and start from scratch?

Thanks!

 

[DaveSimmons]

You probably just need to set the partition to "active." Partition Magic can do this, or a DOS boot disk and FDISK (might only work for FAT32 not NTFS). Or www.bootdisk.com probably has an XP rescue disk.

 

[Viper96720]

Try using the fixboot command from the recovery console. Fixboot writes a new boot sector making your drive bootable.

 

[chocoruacal]

FixMBR. Or do a repair install, but that takes 15-20 minutes.

 

[Viper96720]

Oh yeah since drive isn't bootable a MBR probably wasn't created. Did XP even install anything since he designated the drive as storage?

 

[dwn]

I appreciate all the responses. I tried a few things and didn't get too far. So I just reformatted and did it the right way from scratch... Oh well!

Thanks for the help.