two installs of XP-home

[gbhall]

A friend has an XP-home system that became infected/unstable/unusably slow. This was on a Dell 3100 with, of course, only a reinstall partition. Before I had time to get there some other 'helpful' person had used the F12 reinstall, but somehow created a new install altogether on Drive D: (that is alway factory-built by Dell these days and used for Ghost images.)

Now there are two boot options, and the one on D: is the only working one. Since I am going to be blamed if the machine fails again, I want to re-establish the C: drive copy correctly, and take a proper image onto drive D: for backup (not the other way round).

I know the copy currently on drive D: will have a registry full of D: instead of C:, so a straight partition copy of D: to C: will not work without further attention. It occurred to be to use Drive Mapper from my copy of PowerQuest partition magic.

Has anyone done this successfully, or is there a better way still to do this job ?

 

[Grafficks]

Not too long ago, I had to help someone who also installed Windows XP twice, on C and D partitions. What's worse is that person didn't install anything at all (ie. hardware drivers) on both installations, and just started using it, adding to the problems.

I found that the easiest solution was to boot up on the WindowsXP disc, use their formatting tool, delete the C and D partitions, re-partition the hard drive, and then install Windows again (once!). If you have an OS disc that came with the Dell, you can do this.
Also, are there any files that needs to be recovered from the C drive first? You didn't specify.

Best of luck!

 

[gbhall]

alas, alas

No Dell machine has come with an OS disk for a long time. They install a kind of compressed image on a hidden partition instead. You can indeed boot from it as if it was a CD, so it is actually possible to clear the HD and install from scratch as you suggest.

There is of course data on the C: drive, which is backed up (in the form of a partition image) on the D: drive. Now the D: drive is the one with the active OS, so you can see the problem - active partition and backup partitions are one and the same, which is why I need to sort it out PDQ !