A
Adam Skeaping
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.
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.