Boot Drives, System Drives - Messy Upgrade Problem!

[Guest]

Is there a simple soloution to this?

I did a major upgrade to my PC - new 200G HDD to suppliment an existing 80G
drive. The 80G had been partitioned 15/60, with a Windows XP Home on the 20G
side.

The 200G was partitioned 110/40/40, and fearing my Program Files folder was
getting short on space within that 15G, I had committed one of the 40's to a
reinstall of XP (by installing XP onto the 200 while the 80 was not connected
to the motherboard).

Somehow I have ended up with the 15 as a boot drive, the 40 as a system
drive, so I tried an upgrade install - which did not ask where to install,
but it seems to have made no difference. I canot re-format either drive to
erase the install, and cannot re-nominate one or the other as both a system
and boot drive, to allow me to erase the bad XP install and make use of the
space.

system is as follows:

bios: Award Software, Inc. ASUS P4S800MX ACPI BIOS Revision 1010
celeron 2.4g
256M Ram
200G HDD
80G HDD
DVD-RW
CD-RW

any advice or diagnosis greatly appreciated; the whole thing works - but is,
quite frankly a dog's breakfast - coming from a rebuild I had wanted a nice
clean config, but just have a rats nest.

thanks

sj

 

[george]

Is there a simple soloution to this?

I did a major upgrade to my PC - new 200G HDD to suppliment an existing
80G
drive. The 80G had been partitioned 15/60, with a Windows XP Home on the
20G
side.

The 200G was partitioned 110/40/40, and fearing my Program Files folder
was
getting short on space within that 15G, I had committed one of the 40's to
a
reinstall of XP (by installing XP onto the 200 while the 80 was not
connected
to the motherboard).

Somehow I have ended up with the 15 as a boot drive, the 40 as a system
drive, so I tried an upgrade install - which did not ask where to install,
but it seems to have made no difference. I canot re-format either drive to
erase the install, and cannot re-nominate one or the other as both a
system
and boot drive, to allow me to erase the bad XP install and make use of
the
space.

system is as follows:

bios: Award Software, Inc. ASUS P4S800MX ACPI BIOS Revision 1010
celeron 2.4g
256M Ram
200G HDD
80G HDD
DVD-RW
CD-RW

any advice or diagnosis greatly appreciated; the whole thing works - but
is,
quite frankly a dog's breakfast - coming from a rebuild I had wanted a
nice
clean config, but just have a rats nest.

thanks

sj

Just my take on this.
Going by the premiss that your 200GB is a newly installed baby, it's
probably not yet too committed to anything and that your 80GB drive still
holds the 'official' OS and data you started out with.
I also go by the assumption (lacking info) that you do not have any
particular reason to be partinioning, other than seperating OS and Data.
Given that sscenario I would do the following.
Get a disk imaging solution. (TrueImage, Drive Image, etc.)
Image your 80Gb (both partitions seperately!) onto the 200GB.
Having done that, image yout old OS partition (ie. the 15GB) back onto the
80GB drive, resizing the partition in the process, giving you an 80GB OS
partition with plenty of growth for Program Files.
Temporarily Copy your imagefile of the second partition back onto the now
80GB disk so you can use it in the next step.
Now image this partition onto the 200GB and resize the partition to the full
disk in the process.
Now change the My Documents properties to point to the 200GB disk to contain
all your data.

It's a rough idea, but maybe it helps in the thought-process.

george

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

I would simplify further. I would end up with an 80GB system drive and a
200 GB data drive, no partitions, and let the OS take care of itself with
defaults.

 

[Guest]

The method in my madness (okay, from the look of it, stupidity), was that I
doa lot of video editing - I wanted to have a seperate 120G drive for storage
and manipulation of DV files, another 40G for the software and pgms, and
another 40G for audio only files on the 200G. The 80G was then going to be
partitioned so that only XP was on C drive (15G), and "Program Files" folder
was on the 65G partition on that same drive.

Yes, I can see I could "shuffle" the data around until I freed up one drive
then erased - goo idea, thanks! - but from that then: where in setup am I
able to correct the install such that my new C drive, with windows on it, is
both boot and system drive? Am I correct that the boot drive is selected in
the bios setup at startup, whil the system drive is designated by the where
windows is installed?

Thanks for the patience so far!

Jukebox

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Correct.