Thank you, nepatsfan, for reply and helpful thoughts. Before I look into
your suggested solutions, here's an explanation of my admittedly somewhat
idiosyncratic partitioning system.
On my home/work computers often have 3 or 4 boot partitions, because (a) I
like to have a backup partition in the event of a software accident, and (b)
I'm an audio mastering engineer and like to have one boot partition optimised
for the applications I use just for that.
I also have 4GB RAM, so that 4 possible boot partitions could eat up 20 GB
just for swapfiles. Consequently I have one partition to hold the current
swap file for any of the systems I'm booting to. This habit dies hard, even
though my son only has 1.6GB RAM hence his 2GB dive P (Pagefile). If I have
a spare old small disk lying around, I'll stuff it in and just use it for
pagefile.
With regard to the system partition (i.e. the one with NTLDR and BOOT.INI),
when I format a new drive NTFS I usually get a blank space of 6 or 7 MB at
the start because of the way NTFS likes to arrange itself around the physical
sectors on the disc.
So I often use that first spare fragment as a system partition separate from
any boot (i.e. Windows) partition because sometimes I need to mess with the
first boot partitions (as seen from another boot partition) and don't want
Windows saying 'you can't do that because it's the system partition'.
And I call it drive S for System. Like I call the swapfile partition drive
P for Pagefile.
And for that matter I always call my optical drives (I have 4 on my home
server) W, X, Y, & Z. Again, nobody else needs to be confused by that;
nobody else uses my computer.
Original post:
> > My son's XP is in a bad way, but he doesn't want to trash the installation
> > completely until he has another alternative boot option which he can
> > gradually set up the way he wants.
> > There's plenty of spare space on his 120GB drive, so, keeping the existing
> > boot partition on C:\, I repartitioned it as follows (in order of the
> > partitions from left to right in Disk Manager).
> > 1. NTFS, Active Primary 7MB with just boot.ini and NTLDR etc. (S:\)
> > 2. NTFS, Primary 16 GB with just the tired old Windows & Program Files etc.
> > (C:\)
> > 3. FAT, Logical 2GB just for pagefile (P:\)
> > 4. NTFS, Logical, 16 GB (currently empty but intended for the alternative XP
> > boot)
> > 5: NTFS, Logical, 86 GB for all his data (My Documents points to this)
> >
> > He's lost the original recovery CD, but still has C:\i386, so I ran WINNT32
> > from there, but on selecting New Installation I do not get the option to
> > choose a partition, and the installer tells me there's not enough space on
> > S:\ (not surprising since it's only 7MB).
> > http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305873, was totally unhelpful as it doesn't
> > tell me the reason the installer "sometimes" doesn't offer a partition
> > choice, and it doesn't tell me how to manipulate boot.ini so that the
> > installer will offer the choice.
>
Nepatsfan's reply:
> Since you're starting the installation from within Windows, you should see a
> dialog like this titled Setup Options.
>
> http://www.windowsreinstall.com/winx...all/Image8.gif
>
> Click on the Advance Options button. Check the box next to "I want to chose the
> install drive letter and partition during Setup". This should give you the
> option of selecting installation location during setup.
>
> Here's a web site that you may find helpful.
>
> http://www.windowsxphome.windowsrein...exfullpage.htm
>
> As an aside, I'm puzzled as to what exactly is the purpose of your S and P
> drives. XP needs files such as boot.ini, ntldr, and ntdetect.com to reside on
> the C drive. Where does S get involved in this process? Next, having your
> pagefile on a separate partition on the same hard drive is counter productive.
>
> Good luck
>
> Nepatsfan
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