June 30, 2008

Today I discovered the Windows XP boot order. This was completely accidental, of course. But necessary.

I have my HD partitioned into two partitions, one for data, and one for the OS and programs. Most of my computers I don’t have set up this way, but my main work computer I do, since I store more data on it than any other machine, and it makes it easier to reformat.

I was cleaning up my data partition, and saw that there were some system files on the root. I used to have my Documents and Settings folder on the data drive, but on my last reformat I made the OS partition a little bigger and just kept the D&S on that partition, so I figured the system files on the data partition were just leftovers. I deleted them, finished up what I was doing, then rebooted, and it turns out those system files weren’t leftover.

So I learned (step by step) what the XP boot order is. After the machine POSTs, it looks on the boot drive for the active partition. It then executes ntldr, then NTDETECT.com. After those, it looks in the boot.ini file, which points it to the partition that has your Windows installation. Since (evidently) my data partition for some reason is set as my active partition, I have to keep those three files on it in order to boot my machine. Maybe next time I reformat I’ll try to address that issue as well.

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