removing slave harddrives

[alexXx]

Hi, a while ago i bought upgrade which included a sata hd. What i did was i put my old harddrive as a slave drive(pata) and installed xp on the new sata drive. This worked fine, but when i try to remove the slave drive, the computer will not boot. The sata drive does not contain the ntldr and the 2 other files needed for booting(they are on the pata for some reason). I tried simply adding the 3 files, but my computer will still not boot. I think it is because my sata drive never got a MBR? is that possible?

what i have tried: i tried booting to the xp cd and going into the xp repair utility and there is an option "fixmbr" but the problem is that for 1, i dont know if this will fix my problem, and 2, it says it could cause loss of data and my hd is full of data i want and would require a lot of dvds to backup.

I hope someone has some insight into this.

 

[alexXx]

here is teh error i get:
windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.
could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.
Please check the windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.

 

[alexXx]

also, it should be noted that in disk management, my c drive(the ide drive) is set to system, and the D drive(sata drive) is set to boot

 

[Jerm324]

The ide hard drive should be left as a master, the sata HD snd the ide HD are on two different channels. SATA drives generally requie drivers to be loaded when XP is installed so you can boot from a sata drive.

 

[alexXx]

i can boot to the sata drive when the ide drive is in the computer.. and yes, my windows folder is on the sata drive