[UPDATE: FIXED] OS mess, help me!

[a7berwill]

Here's the deal:

I've got two HDs. A 7200RPM IBM (partitioned into C: and D: ), and a 5400RPM WD (E: )

Forgetting for a moment about how I got here, here's the current situation. On C:, there's a corrupt installation of Win2K. It works, but barely. On D:, there's a new, fresh installation of 2K.
Now, I want to install XP on C:
How do I get rid of the corrupt installation of 2K?
Help, anyone? Thanks!

UPDATE: I booted from the WinXP CD, formatted C: , and installed XP on it. All well and good. But now I can't access Win2K at all! What do I do?

If I have to, I guess I can reinstall 2K on D: (which is where it is now), but I'd really rather not have to go through all that again. Any way I can restore Win2K's information to the boot options?

 

[JayBones1]

First boot up with emergency disk,install cd rom support,when you get to A:\,type in C:\
,Then type FORMAT C:,the puter will ask if your sure and that any info will be lost on that drive,tell it Y for yes.This will format the drive and get rid of the corrupted copy of windows.After formatting you'll get Volume111 Caracters,enter for none.Press enter.THen take the computer to the cd rom drive F:\ as F:\ is the assigned cd rom drive.Type setup.exe.This will begin the reinstall process of windows.Make sure the windows disk is loaded.NOTE:::When you use an emergency start up disk a virtual drive is created ,This usually shifts drive letters up one letter for the cd rom drives.Thus ,that which normally is cd rom drive F:\ becomes G:\ respectively

 

[obenton]

If you format C: you won't be able to boot into your D:'s w2k until you finish reinstalling w2k on C: - so first make yourself a boot floppy, so you can access D:'s w2k. To do this, format a floppy using w2k. Then, to the floppy, copy ntldr, ntdetect.com, and boot.ini from C:\. You can then boot with the floppy and bring up your boot menu.

 

[Pants]

how about just boot off your windows XP cd? when it gets to the part about which partition you want XP on, put it on c: It should also detect windows 2k on D: Make sure you do a CLEAN install i.e. FORMAT c:

 

[a7berwill]

^bump

 

[jfunk]

Did you make the boot floppy as suggested to save your boot manager?

Did XP detect the 2K install?


j

 

[snakeyeis]

OK, here is my solution so that you don't have to go into DOS or format your PC. Just enter the fresh, or the better install of Win2k on d:
Then open explorer, delete the windows dir in c: along the the program files and ducoments and setings of c: if necessary. In addition, you may also want to edit boot.ini either by notepad or by the control panel in your Windows and remove the entry of your c: windows. Then, directly install XP as a fresh copy on c:

LEt me know if this works or if there is something that I'm missing

 

[a7berwill]

I don't have a boot floppy as suggested, no. (As a side note, I'm seriously considering getting rid of my floppy drive and dealing with the inconveniences that not having it would cause - it's pissing me off too much. I actually did make a boot disk, but being stupid, did not test it, only to find out when I needed it that it was a corrupt disk.)

XP did not seem to recognize the 2K installation at all no, there was never any mention of it.

Basically what I need to know now is this. Do I need to reinstall 2K on D: , or is there some way to simply add it to the main boot file in some way (whether manually, through some utility in XP, through the Recovery Console I can access by booting the 2K CD, through some variation of the 2K install process, whatever)?

 

[snakeyeis]

OK, do this :
Goto ctrlpanel, system, startup and recovery
Click on "Edit" startup options manually
Add this line under
[operating systems] at the end like this :
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect

Me think, this should get your problem solved!

 

[a7berwill]

snakeyeis you're a genius! I had to replace \WINDOWS with \WINNT, but it worked!

Thank you!