Installing windows xp and keep existing data - weird problem

[Kogan]

System:
Seagate 200gb drive, one partition, 3gb free
epox 8rda3i (just received from a 4 month RMA hassle)
amd 2400+
256m corsair xms 3200

This is my main system that was down for about 4 months. Originally, it had a 120gb hard drive and I found a good deal on a 200gb, so I bought it and sold the 120gb. I just copied the data straight off the 120 onto the 200gb and filled it up even more with more junk over time using my backup system. the 200gb drive still has my old windows directory, but no boot sector.

So, when I got my motherboad back, I installed everything, loaded up the windows install console recovery thing and fooled around in there thinking I could create a boot sector - I used I think the bootcfg and fixboot commands, but it didn't seem to make any difference and wouldn't boot from that drive. So, I just renamed my windows directory to oldwin and attempted to re-install windows (I've got some stuff in oldwin I wanted to keep).

The first step of installing windows always goes fine. It boots from the win xp cd, copies fies for about 5 minutes and asks to reboot the system. When it reboots, it gives an error - and I get different errors every time I re-install again. I usually get something like:

<system root>\system32\hal.dll is missing or corrupt, please re-install the file.
(I get different file errors sometimes after different attempts at installation)

I also get a blue screen sometimes that says something like "your hard drive is screwed, please reset if this is the first time you saw this and it may fix itself" It gives the same error if I reset again.

I've also attempted to boot using my oldwin directory. This actually boots fine, but brings me up to the blue windows xp installation screen with a mouse pointer and I'm not able to do anything else - ctrl-alt-del or anything doesn't work.

I realize I could probably fix it if I formatted the drive, but I don't really want to do that. Is there any other way?

thanks

 

[santar72]

Have you tried installing windows on top of the exsisting windows dir? Don't use recovery console. Pretend like you are installing a fresh copy of xp and when it ask where you like to install xp, select your old xp partitiom. It should then tell you that there is already xp installed and if you would like to repair xp by install olny xp files. All your old programs should still be there after the install. BACKUP your data just in case. Now you just need to update the new xp with the right regsitry keys by doing repair on all your programs.

 

[Kogan]

It turns out I only needed the 'documents and settings' folder, so I backed that up and tried to do as you suggested. I made my oldwin WINDOWS again, then did the install. It only gave me the option of installing windows in another directory or deleting WINDOWS and making a fresh install. Since I already tried the first option before and ran into errors, I tried the second.

It just finished and now it locks up on the select OS screen I've got two options that say: "Microsoft Windows XP Professional" (one probably from one of my other failed installs) and when selecting either one, the system just stops (I can still reset with ctrl+alt+del, though).

I'll go ahead and start backing up data to prepare for a format, but there are any other ideas, I've love to hear them

 

[Kogan]

Well, I couldn't figure out how to do what I wanted, but I found out that windows was having problems installing on the drive because it was over 137gb (there's some windows xp drive limit thing). Anynow, I re-formatted the drive (it limited me to 137gb), installed windows, updated the service packs and then I was able to format the rest of the drive.

 

[montag451]

thanx for letting us know how it went

Well done