I need help. Recently I bought a netbook (Lenovo S10e) and it has 4GB SSD (soldered on PCB, I think) and 160GB HDD. Win XP SP3 was installed on SSD, while the HDD was completely empty and unformatted. I also got two recovery DVDs, so I suppose there was no recovery partition on HDD. SSD performance is poor and XP was running out of space, so I decided to clone SSD to first primary partition on HDD (10GB, NTFS). I used a program called DrvClonerXP. Cloning went fine, I made that partition active under Disk Manangement, but when I reboot and exclude SSD from boot order in BIOS, it won't boot, I just get blank screen with blinking cursor in the upper left corner. I modified boot.ini on both disks:
[boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="SSD" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="HD 1.partition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT="Recovery Console" /cmdconsIf I bring back SSD to the boot sequence in BIOS (SSD has to be before HDD), then I get to the boot menu above, and I can boot to both installations without any problems. I also installed Recovery Console, but I can't get into it because of "missing or corrupted hal.dll" error.
I also tested booting with bootable USB stick (with NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM and similar BOOT.INI on it) and booted without problems.
I read about "blank screen with cursor" problem and found it was due to corrupted (some or all of):
- MBR
- partition table
- boot sector code
- NTLDR file
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314503
The netbook does not have an optical drive, so I made bootable USB stick with my old XP SP1 cd. Then I used Recovery Console from it and tried to fix HDD installation with FIXMBR and FIXBOOT command, but it didn't help.
I also tried to fix the MBR with free programs like MBRFIX, MBRWiz...
I tried fixing the boot sector of the partition with bcupdate2.exe, bootsect.exe...
No luck, it just won't boot from HDD independently...
I don't think there is a problem with partition table because all partitions are accesible and visible from Disk Management.
NTLDR file is in the root of the HDD partition and is the same as on SSD (I copied it again just to be sure).
What is the goal?
I would like to be able to format the SSD and use it as pagefile or storage, but I can't remove it from the boot order.
Is there a way to make HDD installation independent from SSD?
I heard about grub4dos, but I would like to avoid it, if possible. Reinstallation would be pain in the a** because I don't have an external optical drive (besides I think that recovery DVDs would just restore everything on SSD, like from the factory).
Please help!