safe to format c: ?

[sphere00]

hi,

i have 2 hard drives (c: and d, with windows xp pro installed on c and home edition installed on d. c is the master hard drive with d being the slave, and pro was installed on c before home on d. what i want to do is completely remove the old pro installation and just use the home os on d, using the c drive as a back up (and formatting it). is this safe to do now? is there anything i need to do before formatting? i'm just making sure the home install wouldn't be using anything (drivers, etc) from the windows that was already there that i'd need to keep. in case it matters, i get the option of which os to boot on start up, would home then boot automatically or would i need to edit my boot.ini?

thanks!

 

[RealBlackStuff]

For one thing, the boot-information is in the bootsector on C, and in the root of C: are the systemfiles ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini
I'm not sure about active partitions, how they go together/are needed with XP.
But, if you do NOT re-partition, and leave (for the moment at least) those 3 files in the root of C: alone, you can wipe the rest.
Then edit boot.ini, set default= to your d-drive, and remove the entry for the 'old' c-drive. Finally set the timeout=0 and save the file. Your default will be the d-drive.

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

All Windows versions (that I know) require the boot files to be on the first partition of the first hard disk drive.

If you delete the C: partition completely, XP Home's boot files will be gone, too.

The active partition is the primary partition the computer boots from. All Windows versions (that I know) require the boot partition to be active.

 

[ricvai7]

Why don't u just simply change the Drive D jumper to be a CS or master and let the other one as slave and change the IDE cabel as well just in case. See if u can safely boot from the Home...and if u can...just format the other hard drive without any consequences..

 

[patio]

The jumper swap will not work...No matter how many drives/partitions you have when you install more than one OS ( as far as Windows goes) it will always write information to the boot sector of C:
Changing the jumpers and drives alone will not re-direct the oOS to find those files therefore it will not boot if the drive positions have changed.
If you just want to run XPHome you should back up anything on C: that you want to save, format C: and do a clean install of XPHome.
Then use D: as you like or move what you want off of D: to C:.

But with the 2 OS's set up as is you are inviting headaches. Don't get me wrong it works fine i have 2 different dual-boot systems...but if not set up properly from the beginning you will have problems.

patio.