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 fat32 boot partition C: on 40Gb IDE primary master disk with remaining
space unused.

- a 40gb fat32 partition D: on 200Gb SATA disk, containing only programs and
data. Remaining 160Gb
partitioned ntfs as X: with just data.

- a 18Gb fat32 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.

 

[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 fat32 boot partition C: on 40Gb IDE primary master disk with
remaining space unused.

- a 40gb fat32 partition D: on 200Gb SATA disk, containing only programs
and data. Remaining 160Gb
partitioned ntfs as X: with just data.

- a 18Gb fat32 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.

update - I've played around with it for a bit (no, not that) and got myself to
the stage where the PC is back how it was before, with the boot files on a small
partition of the new drive. Now I just have to try and get it to dual boot Linux
on the unused space on the new disk.

What I did was booted from an XP CD, used diskpart to make a small partition on
the new drive, formatted it fat32, then I couldn't work out how to make the
partition active with the XP repair console, so I rebooted with a Win98 CD and
used fdisk on it to make an active partition. Next I rebooted again with the XP
CD and made it start the Windows setup - this found the previous version of XP
on the other drive and I let it repair that copy. It went through the whole XP
setup rigmarole and when it was done, everything was back to how it was and all
my installed programs and data were available/working like nothing had changed.

Should I move to a Linux group now to complete the solution to my problem?

 

[joseph2k]

update - I've played around with it for a bit (no, not that) and got
myself to the stage where the PC is back how it was before, with the boot
files on a small partition of the new drive. Now I just have to try and
get it to dual boot Linux on the unused space on the new disk.

What I did was booted from an XP CD, used diskpart to make a small
partition on the new drive, formatted it fat32, then I couldn't work out
how to make the partition active with the XP repair console, so I rebooted
with a Win98 CD and used fdisk on it to make an active partition. Next I
rebooted again with the XP CD and made it start the Windows setup - this
found the previous version of XP on the other drive and I let it repair
that copy. It went through the whole XP setup rigmarole and when it was
done, everything was back to how it was and all my installed programs and
data were available/working like nothing had changed.

Should I move to a Linux group now to complete the solution to my problem?

That would be both polite and appropriate. Perhaps comp.os.linux.setup
would be a good starting place. Also just booting / installing from the
Ubuntu CD should result in a complete dual boot system.