I had my COMPUTER set up before with C: as the primary, D: as the secondary with Windows XP on each.   The reason is that if one drive has serious issues/VIRUS I can boot into the good one and repair the bad one.    I never had any problems with this setup.

However, I accidentally erased my D: drive by not paying attention to what I was doing.   I tried to reformat and reinstall.   It seems that XP may be there, but I cannot boot into it anymore.   I tried to reinstall XP onto D, but it is not recognizing this as a drive.

Now my C: drive is older, and not as fast as D - so I WANT to get D going as my main boot drive and use C for storage until I can buy a large (TB) drive.

I(OOPS,  hit the wrong key)

CONTINUANCE:  If someone can help me troubleshoot, I can provide a screenshot of my boot.ini and any drives info from Everest or SiSoft Sandra.

I can follow any instructions given as I get paid to do computer maintenance & virus removal on the side.

I don't want to try and do this without some assistance.   But if all else fails I DO have all my important documents backed up to DVD.Was XP installed to D: with C: still hooked up ? ?
It makes a DIFFERENCE...Yes it was - but that was also the way I did it last time as well.     While the Install CD was running all was okay until it started saying that "x" file could not be copied or something to that effect.

Now when it tries to boot into that drive, I get a message that "hal.dll" is missing or corrupt.    And it appears that when I open the D: drive to view contents some of the folders are there.