Partition problems

[MetalMat]

I also posted this in the tech support forum, was unsure which one to do it in so I did both.

Ok, I have a C and D drive. I wanted to dedicate 10 gigs of space to a windows 98 partitionm and used my c drive when I should have used my d drive. ANyways, it screwed my computer over because when the computer would boot up it would detect the empty 10 gigs of space as the main c drive, and the acronis os selector would not pop up so that I could choose a different os.

So I tried installing windows 98 but it kept not working, so I was like "fine" and put windows xp on the 10 gig partition. When I did that it allowed to to boot to either windows xp partition on the c drive (the old and the new one I just made), so I booted to my origninal windows xp partition. When I got in there I went ahead and deleted the 10 gig partition I made, set it up as an NTFS drive, and tried to transfer that space back (I did not want to lose 10 gigs over nothing). When I did that I got into serious trouble because then BOTH partitions were not working.

So at this point I went ahead and loaded windows xp onto my D drive. When I did that I put Acronis OS selector onto it and when I did that I was able to get back onto my original partition on the c drive.

So, long story short. Here I am with the following:

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y137/Metalmat/Screen01.jpg

Disk 1
Drive D has 57.27GB of total space with 24.28 GB of free space

Disk 2
Fat 16 Partition (39.19mb)
Drive C has 149 GB total with 90 GB of free space
Unallocated (15.69mb)

What I want to do is get rid of that unallocated partition all together and put the space back into my c drive. I also want to still install windows 98, but use my d drive. Dont forget that my d drive now has windows xp on it.

Sorry if its all confusing, but it was a crappy night going through all this stuff

 

[thegorx]

yes, it's totally confusing, but I just woke up
what I seeing is you have two drives ? is that correct ?

so it looks like you created a windows 98 boot partition on c:\
the primary partition on disk 2 ?
then it wouldn't offer XP on boot so you installed xp
then it did offer the xp boot menu
so you booted to your old xp install and formated the boot partition
so you didn't get anything after that ?

I'm not sure if you can resize your relative "C:\" drive back with the 15gb
unless you back up the partitions then remove both partitions
which it doesn't look like you have the room on drive one
hopefully I'm wrong and you can merge it back


but you might be able to do what you want by using the XP CD then
recovery console after you load win98 to the 15GB relative "c:\" drive
and do a fixboot but you might have to look into other commands
such as fixmbr and bootcfg

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;314058


if I'm totally off
you might want to show your setup of hard drives first on how they are connected
ATA or SATA
then on which channel then if master or slave
then partitions primary or extended

because drive letters are all relative


ok... I didn't see the picture
it looks like drive 2 already has two primary partitions
was the new 10gb or 15gb partition also primary partition ?
I'm trying to remember if you can normally have 3 primary partitions on one drive
so maybe I'm way off but my guess sounds like what might have happened

but in any case you should be able to use the recovery console to fix your boot menu
with the 15gb partition formated and in place without having to load xp again