Help - multiple hard drives, dual booting etc...

[James]

Hi. Long story short: I have 2 hard drives - 200Gb and 80Gb. The 200 gig use
to have windows on it along with all my data. Got a new 80 gig to put
windows and program files on (did a fresh install) so was dual booting. Then
decided to get rid of the XP on the 200GB and just boot off the 80Gb, but
couldn't reformat the 200gig since all of my data was on that drive. So I
just deleted all of the windows/program files I could. Everything was fine,
but I noticed that there were still a lot of hidden files in the windows
directory on the 200 gb drive that I couldn't delete. Was taking up over a
gig so decided to uncheck "hide protected operating system files" and delete
everything I could see. But now when I boot I get an error preventing
startup - could not find boot.ini. Why is it looking on that drive for
boot.ini anyway?

Finally I have managed to boot into windows again on my 80gig (by disabling
the 200gig as master in bios). So my problem now is how do I get rid of all
of the extra windows files on the 200 gig that I don't want? (Lots of the
files can't be deleted). I'd simply do a reformat if I could store all of my
data files somewhere.. but I don't have enough space.

Many thanks
James.

 

[Guest]

I have dual boot, and once I've booted on to one OS, I don't have any issues
with deleting any files on the other OS's partition. I did have to enable the
folder options to allow me to view system and hidden files.

 

[Andy]

Hi. Long story short: I have 2 hard drives - 200Gb and 80Gb. The 200 gig use
to have windows on it along with all my data. Got a new 80 gig to put
windows and program files on (did a fresh install) so was dual booting. Then
decided to get rid of the XP on the 200GB and just boot off the 80Gb, but
couldn't reformat the 200gig since all of my data was on that drive. So I
just deleted all of the windows/program files I could. Everything was fine,
but I noticed that there were still a lot of hidden files in the windows
directory on the 200 gb drive that I couldn't delete. Was taking up over a
gig so decided to uncheck "hide protected operating system files" and delete
everything I could see. But now when I boot I get an error preventing
startup - could not find boot.ini. Why is it looking on that drive for
boot.ini anyway?

That's how dual booting works. The BIOS was set to boot from the 200GB
drive, so that's where the boot files are for both Windows XP
installations.

Finally I have managed to boot into windows again on my 80gig (by disabling
the 200gig as master in bios). So my problem now is how do I get rid of all
of the extra windows files on the 200 gig that I don't want? (Lots of the
files can't be deleted). I'd simply do a reformat if I could store all of my
data files somewhere.. but I don't have enough space.

If files can't be deleted, that sounds like they're still in use.
You should be able to simply delete the entire Windows folder in
Explorer without problem.