Dual boot system gone haywire

Anubis08

Senior member
Aug 24, 2004
220
0
0
I know you are suppposed to go oldest first in dual boot for windows, but he has already done it. Now he has removed the 98 information, and he always had some empty space (although formatted) on his HDD. NOw however, his system will ask which of three partitions to boot to at startup and all say Windows XP. He can only choose the first because if he chooses either of the other two it says partition not bootable. He wants to know if he can just expand his XP partition to the whole drive and have one or if he will have to reformat. PLease help as school starts this Tuesday and it is urgent.
 

xgsound

Golden Member
Jan 22, 2002
1,374
8
81
My xp knowledge is limited , but keep this in mind. Win98 partitions were not NTFS, and expanding partitions is risky if they were all NTFS.

I would consider using the other existing partitions to bulk store data such as mp3s, pictures, or video.

I believe boot.ini is the file that controls the boot screen , but check other sources to see exactly what to change such as what drive letters are assigned to xp and so on. (If you only have one, that will be C)

Jim

 

ColKurtz

Senior member
Dec 20, 2002
429
0
0
If you are able, the best solution will be to completely reformat and reinstall. The situation you outlined is probably fixable but there is no telling what else may be wrong or what other problems you'll be seeing soon.

Your multiple XP options on boot is due to junk in the boot.ini. Edit c:\boot.ini (it's hidden) and remove the bogus entries. To ensure you don't delete the wrong entry, put a different label on each line by putting a unique identifier inside each of the quotes: (ie. if each line ended with ..\windows="Windows XP", change what's inside the quotes on one line to be .."Windows XP #1", change the next to "Windows XP #2", etc.

As for expanding the partition, you can do it with Partition Magic, which is fee-based and works great, or you can use free partitioning tools such as Ranish - which supposedly also work great but I've never tried.

Or, your best option is to keep the 2nd partiton for data. That way if you DO have to reinstall the OS one day you won't lose your data.

Good luck.