I had something really odd happen when I reinstalled Windows XP yesterday. Although I simply installed it over the existing Windows XP partition, which was the C: drive and one of 3 partitions on a SATA HDD, it somehow designated the boot volume as instead the E: drive, which letter was assigned to one of the other partitions in my previous XP installation.
The really weird part is that XP also put some of the system files (ntldr.sys, io.sys, ntdetect.com, etc.) on yet another partition of the hard drive.
So now my XP boot volume is the E: drive, but some of the system files are on the D: partition, which Windows XP now calls a system disk!
I haven't been able to untangle this or understand how it happened in the first place. When I installed XP, I certainly didn't ask it to do anything to any of the partitions other than what had been the C: drive. I formatted that partition, then installed XP on it.
I still have my Kubuntu installation on another hard disk, which was, thankfully, unaffected.
Is there some way I can move the system files from the D: partition to the actual Windows install partition (E
so that it's all on the same partition? I don't know how to tell Windows to look there for the files.
It's almost as if my partitions got scrambled during the XP reinstall, such that the system now thinks the D: partition (which was never used for anything but data) is a system disk.
The really weird part is that XP also put some of the system files (ntldr.sys, io.sys, ntdetect.com, etc.) on yet another partition of the hard drive.
So now my XP boot volume is the E: drive, but some of the system files are on the D: partition, which Windows XP now calls a system disk!
I haven't been able to untangle this or understand how it happened in the first place. When I installed XP, I certainly didn't ask it to do anything to any of the partitions other than what had been the C: drive. I formatted that partition, then installed XP on it.
I still have my Kubuntu installation on another hard disk, which was, thankfully, unaffected.
Is there some way I can move the system files from the D: partition to the actual Windows install partition (E
so that it's all on the same partition? I don't know how to tell Windows to look there for the files. It's almost as if my partitions got scrambled during the XP reinstall, such that the system now thinks the D: partition (which was never used for anything but data) is a system disk.
Comment