jarekexe

Hi. I've got a little problem with my SATA drive.

I have 2 HDDs. Let's call them IDE and SATA. I splitted IDE into to partitions [using win2k installer] and installed XP on first. Then I plugged in SATA drive and while IDE was still plugged in, I splitted sats onto 2 partitions [10GB and ~135 or more GB - rest] and installed XP on first one.

And it worked fine. Win2k on IDE was on C and E partitions, XP was on D and F. Of course boot files were on C [IDE] where 2k was.

But since IDE is an old drive and it started to overheat, I decided to get rid of it. That's when it all started. Because obviously I couldn't simply plug it off.

Someone advised me to to as follows: Use BootIt [from bootable CD after plugging off IDE] application to resize the 10GB partition and create 1 additional, small partition. Then activate it, give it MBR and clear signature. Then in recovery console make fixboot, bootcfg /rebuild and fixmbr [as far as I remember]. Everything went smoothly until bootcfg /rebuild command. It gave me an error [something about file systm possibly corrupted] and I was unable to create Boot.ini file.

So I decided to increase that small partition from 1Gb to 4GB and install fresh XP there, just to create that INI file. And hare came more problems. I resized the 9GB partition to 6GB [3GB free space] and wanted to increase that 1GB active partition to 4GB, but it didn't allow me [don't remember why]. So I tried different options. As far as I recall I did something like that: I splitted that 1GB into 0.5 GB/0.5 GB and increase 2nd one to 3.5GB, where I installed XP. I had to leave that 500MB free space, cuz BootIt didn't let me do anything with it.

Now after installing XP onto the 3.5GB partition I have following situation: On partition C, I have old XP system, on D partition I have the data [old ~135GB partition], E is CDROM [??] and F is my system [3.5GB] partition. Of course boot files are on C. So I decided to edit Boot.ini file in order to launch old XP. It pretty worked. In a way that when I chose my old XP from boot menu after editing ini file and rebooting, it started loading, but when the loading screen appeared, my PC froze. Nothing else happened.

my boot ini looks like that now:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect


1st is current [fresh] XP on 3.5GB partition
2nd is old XP on C partition [not working]
3rd is old win2k [not working of course, due to IDE beeing plugged off]


Now I have a mess and I was wondering if someone could help me to fix it. I don't really care now about recovering systems, all I really care is to save my DATA partition, cuz I have a lot of things [~100GB] there, that wone be easy to backup :|

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: I don't know why it displays [space] in word WINDOWS in ini file here in forums. In my file everything is ok.
Also I wanted to add that HHD is working pretty slow. For example when I enter some folders, HDD freezes for a second before displaying its content.

dai

remove the drive you no longer want and the run a repair install on the other one
this will leave your files intact
if you want to recover files off the old drive,reconnect it and save your files

jarekexe

Sorry. After 24h of no replay here, I decided to get help somewhere else. And Im getting it rightnow. Hopefully it will be enough.

But perhaps a quick question here as well - if I wanted to save my old XP? What would I have to do? Because repair install would overrite all registry, right? And Id have to install everythin again... For example Im concerned about my Outlook. I have emails there that Id like to recover.

Btw - any idea, why command
bootcfg /rebuild gave me an error? [I dont quite remember what kind of... something about file system beeing corrupted?]

Inactive

a repair install does not overwrite the registry, so you don't need to re-install all the software that was on the pc already. the only thing i had to reinstall once was the video drivers, nothing else.