Laptop Hard Drive partitioning help

[Anonymooses]

I recently got a new hard drive (160gb) for an older laptop, to replace the dying 30gb drive it previously had

I partitioned the new drive with two partitions, a system drive and a storage drive. Windows XP chose to install on the E drive, and the C drive was left blank. In order to correct this, since I thought it would confuse me, I decided to go into the registry, following a microsoft knowledge base article, and changed the drive letters. I changed C to E and E to C

Now, windows boots properly, but when it gets to the welcome screen, no accounts are displayed, and instead, there is a windows XP logo in the center. I believe that this is due to the fact that windows didn't move the Documents and Settings folder to the new partition, when it moved the windows directory.

I do not have a functional CD drive, so is there any way, using a floppy boot disk or other means, to access a command prompt window without accessing a windows account.

**Safe mode doesn't work either***

 

[LookinAround]

I decided to go into the registry, following a microsoft knowledge base article, and changed the drive letters. I changed C to E and E to C

> You should only be changing drive letters using a partition manager
> You can even just use Windows built-in Disk Management snap-in
> See this MS KB to use Windows built-in Disk Management

However, given your current state of things, i honestly think you're best of reformatting the whole drive and reinstalling Windows as it's not at all clear the state of your registry/accounts/drives/etc.

I would reformat the entire disk as C:
> Install XP onto C:
> Then I'd use a good free partition manager (like EASUS Partition Manager) to resize C, create a D partition and then you can move what you want to it

 

[Anonymooses]

Yeah, I guess I could do that. I just finished setting up all of my old files and programs, so I would like to somehow avoid reformatting

Thanks for the feedback, though