[Dave8282uk]

I'm wondering if you may be able to assist me with a very strange issue i'm having.
I recentley decided to dual boot Windows XP and Server 2003 Enterprise.
I have installed XP no problem at all, all up and running great. I thought I would also install Server 2003 on a seperate hard drive. The installation went as planned as I have done this before using both using a second drive and also using the same drive but with a seperate partition. The problem is, after the installation when I took the Server 2003 disc out of the cd drive and decided to restart my computer, I'm no longer offered the dual boot screen menu to choose the operating system on my choice. Thought it may be a boot record failure, so went to the recovery console and fixboot/fixmbr and also copied the NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM just in case these may have become corrupt, but still no joy. Had a look at the boot.ini file in server 2003 and both operating systems are in there with the server 2003 set as default after 30 seconds, but it still persists to boot into Windows XP without the dual boot screen. Anyway after fiddling around alittle I noticed that if I put my Server 2003 disc in the drive and restart my computer so it boots from the cd to the point where it says "press any key to boot from cd" but ignore it and let it boot from the hard drive, then I'm presented with dual boot screen, in which I can choose the o/s of my choice. It all seems very strange to me, as I have never come across this before. I would be very much appreciated if anyone has come across this issue before. Any answers/comments are very welcome. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Kind Regards Dave....

[slipend]

In CMOS which hard drive is set to be booted off first? XP?

Also, you could try a third party boot loader, I'll try and find one.


edit: You could try this http://gag.sourceforge.net/

[Dave8282uk]

Problem now solved, due to a school boy error, for some odd reason, I had put the CD-ROM drive into SATA1 and HDD with XP into SATA2. Server 2003 is on a IDE drive set to master. Swapped the SATA1 and SATA2 around and it fired straight up.

Thanks Slipend for you comment, due to your response regarding boot sequence and CMOS, made me think about the cabling.

Case Closed