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XP Pro installed twice

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by airforceone42

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I made a mistake somehow in the installation of XP Professional (after a virus and subsequent format of both hard drives and reinstallation) and now I have the OS installed twice. When I play games that require more power (i.e. Elder Scrolls - Morrowind) due to high graphic content, etc., the computer freezes. I am wondering if this (the fact that the machine freezes) is because of the fact that I have XP installed twice.

My computer is an Athlon 900mhz, with two hard drives, both 40gig, one partitioned.

It used to freeze a lot, prior to the crash mentioned above, until I bought a quality power supply. Once I installed the new power supply--all was well until after the crash.

I was wondering if anyone could recommend the steps to take to safely delete one of the two XP installations so that at least I can eliminate that from prospective causes of the freeze ups.

Thanks ahead for any assistance.

Joe
jburr@tampabay.rr.com

12 replies

by thechas

The 2 installs "should" not be conflicting with each other.

The safest way to clean things up would be to format the drive, and start over again.

As to the games freezing up, did you re-install the XP critical updates?

How about device driver updates?

Either can cause software crashes.

Chas

by airforceone42

Hey TheChas, sorry it's taken me so long to get back with you on this but I just got back from a deployment (military) and had a chance to look at your suggestion in depth. I have since formatted my hard drives again and managed to format the e drive but the old one on c still exists and now I have a working "local" drive on the d drive, which really screws things up as everything always looks for the c drive to be the local drive. I tried formatting the drives as u suggested but always foundit impossible to format any drive that had a working directory of windows on it. I thank u immensely for your time nonetheless sir.

v/r

Joe

by airforceone42

Hey TheChas, sorry it's taken me so long to get back with you on this but I just got back from a deployment (military) and had a chance to look at your suggestion in depth. I have since formatted my hard drives again and managed to format the e drive but the old one on c still exists and now I have a working "local" drive on the d drive, which really screws things up as everything always looks for the c drive to be the local drive. I tried formatting the drives as u suggested but always foundit impossible to format any drive that had a working directory of windows on it. I thank u immensely for your time nonetheless sir.

v/r

Joe

by dont-bother

Just remove the one you don't want, using System Manager or by editing boot.ini

Then reboot to the OS instance you wanted and then delete the other one.

Shouldn't cause any problems running two instances though!

I suspect you have a .dll file (system file) corruption/mismatch.

You can run sf.exe /scanonce at the command line to check for file corruption (automatic replacement). Also choose drive properties and run a full system check on any pertinent hard drives (will require a restart).

Hopefully, one of these will fix/cure your problem. If not, unless you have a compelling reason not to, I'd reformat and re-install correctly the first time (now that you have experience) :)

Been-There Done-That :)

by airforceone42

Hey don't-bother, sorry it's taken me so long to get back with you on this but I just got back from a deployment (military) and had a chance to look at your suggestion in depth. I have since formatted my hard drives again and managed to format the e drive but the old one on c still exists and now I have a working "local" drive on the d drive, which really screws things up as everything always looks for the c drive to be the local drive. I tried editing the boot.ini drive as u mentioned but there's only one and it's on the c drive, but I couldn't figure out how to edit out any of the other windows installations as it said very little. I thank u immensely for your time nonetheless sir.

v/r

Joe

by airforceone42

Hey don't-bother, sorry it's taken me so long to get back with you on this but I just got back from a deployment (military) and had a chance to look at your suggestion in depth. I have since formatted my hard drives again and managed to format the e drive but the old one on c still exists and now I have a working "local" drive on the d drive, which really screws things up as everything always looks for the c drive to be the local drive. I tried editing the boot.ini drive as u mentioned but there's only one and it's on the c drive, but I couldn't figure out how to edit out any of the other windows installations as it said very little. I thank u immensely for your time nonetheless sir.

v/r

Joe

by ann777

I would suggest that you start over (as I did) when my XP laptop started acting wierd with the XP SP1 install.

Boot to the XP cd and make sure that you format the drive with either a Quick Format or the slower one.... but do not assume your answers to the questions the XP asks -- read it.

There IS a format step, and you skipped that step once (I did too, and ended up with duplicate profiles as well as a non-satisfactory working computer), that will take you to a fresh install.

by airforceone42

Hey Anna777, sorry it's taken me so long to get back with you on this but I just got back from a deployment (military) and had a chance to look at your suggestion in depth. I have since formatted my hard drives again and managed to format the e drive but the old one on c still exists and now I have a working "local" drive on the d drive, which really screws things up as everything always looks for the c drive to be the local drive. I tried reinstalling (like I mentioned) and read closely the steps as I installed but found it impossible to format over drives that already had been designated as "local drives." I thank u immensely for your time nonetheless ma'am. I will try your steps tomorrow tho and if it works, is there someway I can come back and thank you? I just can't figure out how to format the entire drive (in my case - 2 drives) in XP, as I haven't found out how to make a boot/rescue disk. Booting to cd doesn't work. Nevertheless, I thank u.

Joe
jburr@tampabay.rr.com
airforceone69@yahoo.com

v/r

Joe

by djacks12

I recently had the same siituation. Video drivers turned out to be the culprit.
once they were installed properly no more problems.

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