Windows Vista/XP Partition Conflict

Greetings, was wondering if anyone can help me.

i bought a system with a 250gb harddrive preinstalled with vista. When i checked the hdd spec, it was partitioned into half exactly. Fine. After a day or so i decided vista was not for me & tried to format and instal xp pro ontop. Piece of cake i thought wrong!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Half of the entire drive became hidden on xp. So far (during one of my many formats) i managed to get the entire whole lot visable on xp, but you have todo it FROM vista. E.G. boot from the vista setup cd, and change the partition size. Then restart machine with xp setup cd, and it can now SEE the whole hard drive.

BUT... it says exactly this from the xp setup

(131070MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on Bus 0 on Atapi [mbr])
C: Partition 1 [NTFS] 239370MB (130999MB FREE)

It says press C to change partition size, but it wont let you!!! And if you press delete it makes half of it INVISIBLE .. back to 131070MB hard drive. Then in order to change this you have to load the sodding shitsta again. Basically... shitsta has control of my hdd! & master boot stuff, which i don't understand fully as im not tech.

I just want to be able to install xp with the option to choose a couple partitions and there size, with no sign of shitsta in sight! I am now back to the original problem, im running xp pro with half partition hidden.

Using PARTITION MAGIC 8, i clicked change drive to logical partition - and it showed spec that the other half is there! SEE THIS SCREENSHOT>>>

http://mysite.orange.co.uk/files00/logicalpartitionshitstaproblem.JPG
It said it had to restart todo it, at first it gave an effor saying cannot lock drive, it restarted again and completed to 100%... so i restarted, and then the entire OS was gone AGAIN!

i will continue till the thing is resolved if it kills me. If anyone can help i will be most gracious.

THANKS.
JON

 

Make sure your XP install disk is slipstreamed to SP2, sounds like the 127GB issue

 

Hello,

Try the following:

1. Download GParted, burn the iso to CD.
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

2. Boot into GParted live CD session. Check the partition table. See what partitions you have and how they're arrayed. Then, if you like, you can delete all partitions. Reboot.

3. Boot from Window CD and try again.

Mrk

 

This is a good reason to ALWAYS have two hard drives. Put one in an external enclosure and partition just enough to load up an OS, such as XP SP2. Then yu always have boot functionality no matter what you do, and as a great caveat, you can scan your main OS for rootkits and other malware easily.

For your problem, why bother looking at partitions at all? Load SP SP2, repartition, done. Then invest in a 40 dollar HD and either external it or internal it, and choose your boot from the BIOS.

Trust me on this one, you'll be glad you did it. You'll always have access to the internet, programs, and an OS that way.

I have a fully loaded work station on one drive using XP SP 2. I auto backup my FIrefox bookmarks and other data to the corresponding XP drive. When I go down on my main load, I simply boot from the back up OS and keep going.

 

Id like to thank everyone for their help. It was the slipstream sp2 issue