Hello – Can you help me?
It seems that my XP Professional installation disc has become dodgy! After a struggle I have formatted a new 80Gb hd and installed the XP. I made 4 partitions of roughly 20Gb each. During installation, the program became unstable. Instead of completing the process (partition 1), it suddenly wanted to redo it. I let it, but it made the same circle again. I panicked and selected partition 2. Same again. I cannot remember what I did, but suddenly it carried on completing the install in partition 2. When it finished and windows booted up, I was confronted with a choice of OS: both with the same (correct) name. I accepted the top choice and it was a normal boot-up. BUT… In Windows Explorer partition 1 is the C drive (unfortunately!). It carries only the failed ‘half installed’ OS. (I also want to get rid of the ‘choice’ if possible). The full OS is in partition 2 (Drive D). System sensitive stuff that would normally automatically install in C:\Program files, goes instead to D:\Program Files (fortunately). I would like to change the drive letter of partition 2 (D drive) to C. Then I could rename partition 1 and use Windows to format it, thus reclaiming the space, but, what ‘punishment’ would that bring? Disk Management says it cannot rename system or boot drives. This means I could not rename D to C anyway. I am wary of putting anything on drive C at all. I am worried that, at some point, XP will object to this odd arrangement,
become currupt and crash. The logical course is to reformat the whole disk etc, but I am fearful of using my Disk, then having no OS. I am just not skilled enough to cope with these problems. Nevertheless, I have successfully installed SP1 and ‘Activated’ the system on Drive D. As a last resort, if it is safe to do so, I can just leave well alone and forget about the 19Gb+ C drive (of which only 534Mb has been used). I have never seen anything anywhere that covers this!
Thank you