Remove dual boot question

[ptitterington]

Presently I have 2 hds. On 1 I have a dual boot 98se as C
xp Home as D.
On the other hard drive and I have xp pro but as slave on the same IDE cable to use in emergency as I was having a few problems which now seem to be cured.

I find now that I dont need the win 98 as I now have everything working fine and would like to Merge it all together.(C+D)
I have access to Partition Magic 7 if I need.

I really dont want to wipe all just at the moment.

Also for Video work will I be better to put the other HD on a separate cable on the Raid.??

 

[Rick]

For video work, if you have two FAST drives, I would recommend putting them on seperate IDE channels. You could use the second as a "scratch disk" which may speed things up substantially. RAID configurations aren't nearly as efficient as two seperate drives in this case.

As for your problem, first I would try making Windows XP's drive the master and leave the other drive unhooked for the time being. XP has the ability to boot like this, depending on how it was setup.

This may work and it may boot fine.. However, if it does not work, then leave everything where it is and plugin your CDROM (if you haven't already done so). Pop in the Windows XP CD and boot from it just like you are going to install Windows XP again. This time though, choose ASR (Automated System REcovery) when prompted. You'll have wait a few minutes before this options comes up, but this should solve your problem. It will repair the XP installation so that it is bootable once again (in the event it was not). Remember, you don't have to do this step if it still boots into XP when you change the drive from slave to master.

Hopefully that will work. If you have any questions or it turns out to be a big flop, then post back.

 

[ptitterington]

Thanks Rick, but actually the master drive is split into 2x20gig partitions one with (98 on FAT32 and the other NTFS with xp)
This is the drive I need to sort out.
If I remove the 98 partition I want to loose the dual boot option at startup and hopefully the xp home drive D will become C and boot.

What I have is 3o gig 7200 maxtor which I will wipe and use for the video and the 40 gig 7200 Seagate that has the os on.I also have a CD burner and a DVD/CD reader If i am not to use the raid and am to set the 2 HDs on different channels, Will I be connecting each HD as master and each player as slave and setting the Maxtor as 1st boot? and forgetting about the raid altogether?

Sorry to be so thick

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Originally posted by ptitterington
Will I be connecting each HD as master and each player as slave and setting the Maxtor as 1st boot? and forgetting about the raid altogether?

That's what I would do.

 

[ptitterington]

Just a couple more questions,

Should I keep the HD with video on the other IDE cable from the Burner, I know copying from cd to cdrw on the same cable is slow.

Also having never used Partition Magic, Will removing the fat32 partition on the HD, formatting to NTFS and merging it together with the 'd' partition with my OS work or am asking too much.

Ive backed up most stuff but its always a pain to get it all just how you like it.

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

CD-drives should be kept on separate channels if copying from cd to cd, so having hdds as masters and cd-drives as slaves would be the best configuration.

Partition Magic should be able to remove the fat32 partition, convert fat to ntfs and merge partitions (there are some limits though). I'm not sure if the to-be-merged partitions ought to be both fat or ntfs though. So yes, it should work without data loss, but hey, anything is possible..

 

[Phantasm66]

Like Michtlan says, the merge MAY work but things like that can go nastily wrong. I would advise backing up all important data, removing and re-creating partitions and formatting afresh - if that's an option for you. If not, then you can try but I am never very optimistic about these kinds of operations.

 

[Nodsu]

Partition Magic should be able to remove the fat32 partition, convert fat to ntfs and merge partitions (there are some limits though). I'm not sure if the to-be-merged partitions ought to be both fat or ntfs though. So yes, it should work without data loss, but hey, anything is possible..

AFAIK PM7 doesn't let you merge NTFS partitions.

You should delete the fat partition, then move the NTFS one to the beginning of disk (takes a _lot_ of time!) and finally resize it to cover the whole disk. Don't forget to convert the final partition to primary and activate it.

 

[StormBringer]

Why not just move the primary partition(the one with the OS you want to keep) and make it first, then format the others to use as storage, or scratch disks or whatever. Smaller partitions are more efficient than larger ones because they don't become fragmented as often.

 

[ptitterington]

Well I tried it and it went wrong. It was taking an aweful long time but had an error, stopped, all appeared ok but I could not boot so I wiped and started again which is for the best, other than I forgot to backup my address book.

One thing, I copied my favourites but when I open favourites from the desktop my copied favorites are in a folder called favorites, this often happens when i copy my documents, I get a file in a file in a file, Is there an easy way to take the contents out if you know what i mean to save clicking then clicking till you get to the bit you want.


Thanks