Reinstalling XP after removing 7, to make it a boot drive:

I have two hard drive's installed here on a computer, and what I want to do is return it to XP, as I have installed 7 on it, and had a graphic issue, therefore, I installed a second drive as the master and the one with 7 on it was the slave therefore the computer boots to xp which is on the second drive and I can see the other drive in My Computer, however and for that reason I decided that it would be best to Format it and it was formatted, presuming now that 7 is gone (after the formatting). I would like to put xp on it again so that I will not have the graphic issue. The drive is clean and both drives hoods have been removed, although the computer boots into xp, I want the other drive which is bigger to be the boot drive. And so I went into the bios to try and see it I can change the boot sequence but it still boots into xp upon reboot. What should I do? 7 has been wiped off and the drive is empty...

 

Welcome to the "Family" BCreate.

 

Don't know why no one has responded to this as it's a pretty straightforward problem. One way of handling it would be to image the XP drive to an external drive and, after physically disconnecting the XP drive, using your imaging program's rescue CD to restore the image to the now empty drive. Make sure the drive is set as master before rebooting.

You might get a hal.dll error on reboot which would require an edit of the boot.ini file. In case this happens make sure you have a boot disk of some sort with a text editor on it - Puppy Linux live CD for example - and also access to another computer in case you need any help with boot.ini.

Assuming all is well you can then reconnect the old XP drive as Slave and reformat it.

If you don't have an imaging program then EaseUS Todo will do the job and be useful to you in future.