Personnally I think I'd be inclined to start again, and disconnect all
drives other than the one you want as C and a single cd, then repair the
winxp installation.
Having first read your mobo manual to ensure you have installed the sata
drive to the correct sata connector and if neccessary configured the bios,
and whether you need to F6 to install the sata driver from floppy during the
proccess.
Once running ok connect a single drive at a time, in the order you want
I've no idea what you've done to get boot files on all your hd's, it may be
neccessary to delete partitions on these

"Mark G." <askmefirst@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:eAGraMz$GHA.1464@TK2MSFTNGP02.phx.gbl...
> Please bare with me as I explain what I have done to this point so that
> hopeful I can get a clear, concise answer that solves my issue
immediately.
> I appreciate your reading this and your patience and thoughtfulness in
> answering it.
>
> So I reloaded windows on my computer completely whipping out the old
> install. No problems there and all went as planned. My computer setup
> consists of the following:
>
> SATA Raptor 72gig drive (primary SATA) - 2 partitions, 1 - 40gig (label
C:)
> and 1- 30gig (label D:)
> SATA Maxtor 250gig drive (secondary SATA) (label F:)
> IDE Maxtor 120gig drive (primary IDE) (label E:)
> IDE Maxtor 40gig drive (secondary IDE) (label G:)
> IDE ZIP 100 (label B:)
> IDE CD/DVD-RW Drive (label H:)
>
> Anyhow, I partition the Raptor drive because I like to have my OS on the
> 30gig partition along with things like my anti-virus software, winzip,
etc..
> while on the 40gig drive I generally put fast games like Half Life 2 or
> Battlefiled 2.
>
> Anyhow, I had to mess around to get windows in the initial installation of
> XP Pro top recognize the Raptor SATA drive as being where I wanted drive
C:
> to be. I also had to allocate 8mb for some reason to another IDE drive and
> in doing so, created an I: drive which merely consist of a boot.ini file,
an
> ntldr file, and a ntdetect.com file. So it is relatively small, but for
some
> reason, I did not see any way around this. After getting all installed, I
> did not care for the drive letters assigned to certain drives so I
therefore
> used Partition Magic 8 to re-label the drives to the drive letters of my
> choice. While doing this, I was careful as to not mess with any drive that
> was a system or boot drive as I have had problems with that in the past.
> Anyhow, all seemed fine, I patched everything with auto updates and
> proceeded to move forward in setting things up. In that, I finally removed
> my Windows XP CD to load other CD's of things I needed. Anyhow, when
> rebooting, I get the famed ntldr is missing error. Fine, I simple go into
> recovery console to correct. In doing so, I just copied both the ntldr and
> the ntdetect.com files to the root of my C: drive. After rebooting again,
> then I got some kind of boot.ini issue/error, but it still proceeded to
boot
> into windows just fine. And then finally, after that, I get the hal.dll
> error. Through all of this, I just copied the appropriate files from the
> installation CD to where they were need, the first 3 to the root of C: and
> the hal file to sys32 under windows. With that, I then looked to see what
I
> had where and fine that I had a boot.ini file, ntldr file, and a
> ntdetect.com file on 3 drives for some reason. I know why they were on the
> I" drive to start with as you remember, windows wanted to create that
space
> upon initial installation. They were on my C: drive because I copied them
> and I think they were on my E: drive (which was unplugged during initial
> installation) due to something with an old xp install, probably my
previous
> install be fore reloading.
>
> Anyhow, now, I will continue to get a hal.dll file is missing or corrupt
> error unless I have the xp pro cd in my drive. If I take the CD out, I get
> the error and no boot, but leaving it in, and windows loads just fine.
>
> So, what I am thinking is that I need to delete some files. I mean, with
my
> configuration, do I need to ntldr and other files on all of those drives?
> What should I have where with this configuration given that I had to setup
> that I: drive and that I want to boot into my raptor drive which contains
my
> OS? Seems simple, but for the likes of me, not sure what to do next and
> thought I would ask. Below, is what each boot.ini file says:
>
> C: drive:
>
> [boot loader]
> timeout=1
> default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOW S
> [operating systems]
> multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP
> Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
>
> E: drive:
>
> [boot loader]
> timeout=30
> default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOW S
> [operating systems]
> multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP
> Professional" /fastdetect
>
> I: drive:
>
> [boot loader]
> timeout=1
> default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOW S
> [operating systems]
> multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP
> Professional" /fastdetect
>
> Remember, my E: drive is just a data drive. I hope someone can help and
> thank you again for reading all of this. I just wanted to be clear and
> concise on the setup, what I did and all of that. Thanks much and the help
> is much appreciated.
>
>
>