Will Disc Director Suite help my problem?

Firstly hello to all, new to the forum and hope that someone may be able to help

I decided today to resinstall my XP after a few weeks of increasing problems, it all went smoothly (or so i thought) untill i rebooted and it offered me the option to boot to either Windows XP Home or Windows XP Home, and i now realise that I have just created a partition, on with the new OS and one with the old on!!!!,

I really dont want to go through the whole process again through reinstalling (i know where i went wrong now) and as i have "Partition Magic" would i be able to delete the old XP home information using that? or any other programme that i may be able to use,

The strange thing is that I still only have one drive showing as C: no other drives are there, i thought that it would name the one with the old version on as D for example.

All that i have is the C: showing as 98GB free out of 140gb, and i know that the new xp has used only about 15-20gb, i was dubious about using partition magic as i cant seem to physically see the old installation anywhere,

I had a suggestion to use msconfig and opt for boot.ini and check the boot paths to see if any where invalid but it says that none of the paths are invalid and the system is working fine,

I have tried partition magic, but as i cant physically see the old OS on my C drive i cant seem to do anything with it,

I really could do with any help available and look forward to any suggestions,

Thanks

Froggy

 

Sounds to me like you will have to do some advanced configuration file editing yo correct this problem. Acronis DD will probably show you the same partition info as PM. Did you look at the drive partitions with built-in XP utilities? Check the hidden\active flags. I seriuosly doubt if OSS would help, since you are not trying to dual boot, you just want 1 clean XP.

In the long run it will probably be faster and safer to wipe the drive clean and start over with a clean XP install. But hang on a while, one the forum experts here may offer a better solution.

MangoMan

 

Froggy:

Could you post a picture of your disk using the Windows Disk Management Console, similar to the one that I have attached to this message? Go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management and then click on "Disk Management" in the left pane.

Also please post a copy of your boot.ini file. In control panel go to System -> Advanced -> and under "Startup and Recovery" click on the "Settings" button. Under "System Startup" click on the "Edit" button next to "To edit the startup options file manually, click Edit". This will open notepad and display a copy of the boot.ini file. Copy the text and paste it in your reply. Here's an example from my boot.ini file:

Code:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

 

I might sound like and idiot (well i will) but i have never had to post a screen shot before, how do you do it!!!!

 

Scrub that last comment, managed to do it and will post shots shortly, thanks for your help so far,

 

Hi,

I have attached the screen shot as requested, and the boot.ini details are below,

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


Also when i search my computer i have 2 windows folders, windows and windows0, when i look in them one is the old os contents and one is the new one,

Look forward to your reply,

Cheers

 

Froggy:

That's a new one for me. I've never seen Windows install two copies of itself to the same drive.

Let's see:

1. Partition Magic or Acronis Disk Director won't help you out here. From your posted screen shot you only have one partition on your hard disk.
2. You could edit your boot.ini file to have only one of the operating systems in the list. That would eliminate the screen you see at boot time.

But I'm not sure where you would go after that. You could possibly determine which of the two Windows installations was working correctly by booting into each of them separately and evaluating. Then find out which Windows folder belongs to which boot entry, and delete the unwanted Windows folder. But I really don't know whether you will end up with a registry that is correct or what other side effects this might cause. So at this point I think your best bet is to reinstall.

I would do a clean install; in other words copy all of your personal files and anything else important to some kind of backup media; an external hard disk, flash drive, CDs or any other place for safe keeping. When you reinstall, this time delete all of the existing partitions on the disk and completely reformat the disk during the installation of Windows. You should end up with a correctly installed OS when you are finished. I know that it will be a lot of work but I really think that it's your best bet unless somebody else has a better idea.

 

Hi,

Thanks for your advice, i think im going to have to bite the bullet and do a clean install on monday, so if anyone can think of an other way i would welcome the advice,

Thanks a lot for your help thus far,

 

froggywhite,

I have seen Windows install itself into a different directory. What you ended up doing when you did the reinstall was not replacing the existing XP installation. As a result, it installed into a new directory.

After your reinstall, did you have to reinstall all of you apps or were they still there? Was your desktop background as before? Did you end up with another Program Files directory too?

The newest one is probably the "Windows0" one, since the first install will normally be just "Windows". You can, as Mark said, just remove the incorrect entry from the boot.ini file and go ahead and use the computer, or clear the drive and do a complete reinstall. Functionally, I think it's probably fine, but you never know if later down the road you'll run into a problem because Windows is not in the default location.

If you're comfortable doing a "clean" reinstall of XP, I think it would be the best in the long run. However, if you didn't have to reinstall your apps previously, you will this time.

 

Once i reinstalled windows xp it was as though i had a completely new system, everything was the same as if i had clean installed the OS, screen saver was different and there were no programmes or settings related to the first installation,

I remember pressing the install button when i was asked to delete the partition and knew that i should have chosen the other option,

Can you give me help on how to edit the boot.ini so the 2 options dont appear, only the newest one, when i start my pc the newest one is the first one in the list, i have had a look and cant seem to find anywhere to delete the second option,

Also if i go into the old OS on boot and delete all the files that are taking up space (music, software, video files etc) can i delete them without it affecting the newest OS,

I know that doing a complete reinstall would be the best but im concerned that i may balls that up and make the whole pc totally unbootable,

Froggy

 

You can delete them but when you do they will be gone in both versions of the OS, so be sure that's what you want to do.

Yes; see post #3 above for how to view boot.ini in Notepad. Follow those steps and when you are viewing the file in Notepad just delete everything related to the second OS leaving only the following:

Then choose "Save" from Notepad's menu to save the file.

The choice is yours but you may end up spending more time than you think getting things cleaned up. It may actually take you less time and effort to just do a clean reinstall, and you'll know that you have Windows set up properly when you're done.

 

Thanks for your help mark,

I will be editing the boot.ini tomorrow as im away and on my laptop today, will post back tomorrow with the outcome, have a good weekend,

Cheers again,

Froggy

 

Hi, just and update, have edited the boot.ini as suggested and all is working fine, thanks,

I realise that i still have the old OS on my HD but i will be replacing the pc soon and just couldnt face another clean install, i think i would go mad if i messed it up again!! as they say you learn from your mistakes!!

Thanks for all you help,

Froggy