confusing XP installation problem

[fred]

Ok, here's the situation.


I have a machine with 3 disks & 2 DVD drives organised into a mish/mash of hardware
as follows (don't ask):

- a 200Mb fat13 boot partition C: on 40Gb IDE primary master disk with remaining space unused.

- a 40gb fat13 partition D: on 200Gb SATA disk, containing only programs and data. Remaining 160Gb
partitioned ntfs as X: with just data.

- a 18Gb fat13 partition E: on a 18Gb SCSI disk containing the Windows XP Home OS.

- a DVD drive Y: IDE secondary master

- a DVD drive Z: IDE secondary slave


Problem - The disk with the boot partition (C had a spectacular head crash and died.
Now I want to put a replacement 200Gb drive in its place on primary IDE master and create a
small boot partition C: on it like I had before and also format the remaining space as ext3
and put Linux on it as a dual booting OS.
I want to re-create the files necessary for XP to boot on the new C: partition and leave
the XP OS intact on drive E: without re-installing it. It is not important to be able to
transfer files between the two OSes, so that is not an issue.

How am I going to do this and what am I going to need? I have XP Home install CD, Windows 98 &
Windows 98SE install CDs, Ubuntu Linux install CD, no bootable floppies.
This computer can boot from a CD.

Thank you for your help.

 

[joseph2k]

Ok, here's the situation.


I have a machine with 3 disks & 2 DVD drives organised into a mish/mash of
hardware as follows (don't ask):

- a 200Mb fat13 boot partition C: on 40Gb IDE primary master disk with
remaining space unused.

- a 40gb fat13 partition D: on 200Gb SATA disk, containing only programs
and data. Remaining 160Gb
partitioned ntfs as X: with just data.

- a 18Gb fat13 partition E: on a 18Gb SCSI disk containing the Windows XP
Home OS.

- a DVD drive Y: IDE secondary master

- a DVD drive Z: IDE secondary slave


Problem - The disk with the boot partition (C had a spectacular head
crash and died. Now I want to put a replacement 200Gb drive in its place
on primary IDE master and create a small boot partition C: on it like I
had before and also format the remaining space as ext3 and put Linux on it
as a dual booting OS. I want to re-create the files necessary for XP to
boot on the new C: partition and leave the XP OS intact on drive E:
without re-installing it. It is not important to be able to transfer files
between the two OSes, so that is not an issue.

How am I going to do this and what am I going to need? I have XP Home
install CD, Windows 98 & Windows 98SE install CDs, Ubuntu Linux install
CD, no bootable floppies. This computer can boot from a CD.

Thank you for your help.

Ubuntu can setup the partitions for you, then to boot using a bootable
freedos CD to install dos in the 200 MB partition. Then (optional) install
win 98SE (this will destroy the Ububntu boot setup). Perhaps at that point
you can do a rescue install of XP and save some of the existing setup.