Losing settings as I fumble thru partitioning

[Guest]

First, thanks to u many mvp's who have posted many helpful responses to others. I haven't seen my prob listed, so here goes

I've been trying to switch my larger HDD to become the C: drive, with a full copy of the old C: drive bootable, by using V-Com's Partion Commander, and other utils of theirs. XP Pro kept reporting the new C: as H: until I just disconnected the second drive and went through tons of gyrations to get the new C: drive to boot. However, in this process, the software managed to set up some new items in "Documents and Settings," and each new one lost the old settings, including Favorites, desktop stuff, and who knows what all else. I now see something like this in the Docs and Settings folder
kuzdou
kuzdoug.COMPUTERNAM
kuzdoug.COMPUTERNAME.000

I finally checked the desktop settings in each, to determine which was what, and, of course, the "kuzdoug" item is the one that originally had been tied to my "kuzdoug" administrator logon (using a fake username, here, BTW, for security). I decided to try deleting the duped entries, which worked, all except the *.*0001 listing, which would not allow access

How can I get back all those settings? I presume that if I can delete kuzdoug.COMPUTERNAME.0001, that the system will see only the original kuzdoug group of settings and return to them. If that's correct, then how do I get rid of it? Can I set up a different administrator user, log to it, and then remove that extraneous file? Or must I do some changes in a registry file somewhere?

 

[Guest]

XP doesnt transfer very well with its security measures built in fro
microsoft,you should set youre partitions,install xp cd,boot from cd,instal
new copy of xp,when its thru,shut-down,reconnect old hd,as slave,retriev
documents etc as needed,xp would/will set the letters accordingly,if partition
or drive letters arent as you like,go to run,type:diskmgmt.msc in mgmt,L.clic
a drive,actions,all,change drive letters.

 

[Jim]

Holy cow, what have you done?!

If all you were trying to do is clone the old HD to a new HD, it's
relatively simple to do. I'd forget all this stuff about trying to fix the
current mess and just start over. All you need to do to is the following:

1) Visit http://www.bootitng.com and download BootIt NG. Unzip the file, and
execute BOOTITNG.EXE to create the bootable floppy (accept the defaults).
Now shutdown the PC.

2) Assuming old HD is master on primary IDE controller (IDE1), move old HD
to slave on IDE1, or master on secondary IDE controller (IDE2). Install new
HD to master on IDE1 (replacing old HD). Be sure to get HD jumpers setup
correctly! Use cable select (CS) if unsure.

3) Insert BootIT NG floppy and reboot to floppy A:. When the Welcome to
Setup screen appears, select Cancel, follow the prompts, and you will be
taken to the main menu, where you can select the Partition Manager.

4) Your new HD will be displayed by default (HD0). To see the contents of
the old HD, select HD1 (in the upper left corner). To clone HD1 to HD0,
select the first partition on HD1, hit Copy, switch to HD0, select the
freespace, and hit Paste. In all likelihood, you'll probably want to expand
the partition to take advantage of the increased drive capacity. Select the
newly cloned partition, hit Resize, choose a new size (if the file system
type is of type FAT, you can convert to FAT32 as well), then hit OK. Repeat
for each partition on HD1, in order.

HINT: If you are cloning a Windows XP partition based on FAT32 and intend to
convert to NTFS later, then once copied, select the cloned partition, hit
Resize one more time, but choose the "Align for NTFS" option (the size
parameters will be disabled), and hit OK. This will ensure the NTFS
conversion results in 4K allocation units. If you don't do this, then the
conversion to NTFS will result in only 512 byte allocation units (not nearly
as efficient).

5) At this point, although all the partitions on the old HD (HD1) have been
copied to the new HD (HD0), the new HD is NOT yet bootable, we'll correct
that now. Select HD0 from the upper left corner. Hit View MBR, and in the
dialog, you will notice four entries in the MBR (Master Boot Record). Each
entry w/ a non-zero address represents one of your cloned partitions.
Select the bootable partition (usually the first MBR entry), hit "Set
Active", and the partition will indicate Active status. Now hit "Std MBR",
this will initialize the boot loader in the MBR. Finally, hit Apply to save
the changes.

6) Hit Close, remove the BootIt NG floppy, and hit Reboot. Your system will
now reboot as before but using the new HD. Before rebooting Windows, you
may wish to shutdown and remove the old HD. This will avoid drive letter
assignment messes, like the one you had before (it's always a bad idea to
maintain primaries on anything but the first drive due to the way the BIOS
and Windows assigns drive letters).

HTH

Jim

First, thanks to u many mvp's who have posted many helpful responses to

others. I haven't seen my prob listed, so here goes:

I've been trying to switch my larger HDD to become the C: drive, with a

full copy of the old C: drive bootable, by using V-Com's Partion Commander,
and other utils of theirs. XP Pro kept reporting the new C: as H: until I
just disconnected the second drive and went through tons of gyrations to get
the new C: drive to boot. However, in this process, the software managed to
set up some new items in "Documents and Settings," and each new one lost the
old settings, including Favorites, desktop stuff, and who knows what all
else. I now see something like this in the Docs and Settings folder:

kuzdoug
kuzdoug.COMPUTERNAME
kuzdoug.COMPUTERNAME.0001

I finally checked the desktop settings in each, to determine which was

what, and, of course, the "kuzdoug" item is the one that originally had been
tied to my "kuzdoug" administrator logon (using a fake username, here, BTW,
for security). I decided to try deleting the duped entries, which worked,
all except the *.*0001 listing, which would not allow access.

How can I get back all those settings? I presume that if I can delete

kuzdoug.COMPUTERNAME.0001, that the system will see only the original
kuzdoug group of settings and return to them. If that's correct, then how
do I get rid of it? Can I set up a different administrator user, log to it,
and then remove that extraneous file? Or must I do some changes in a
registry file somewhere?

 

[Guest]

I confused the issue with my background explanation, Andrew. I now have the larger disk working right, as C:, and it has all the apps loaded (using V-com's Copy Commander)

The prob now is that it comes up with the multiple listings under "Documents and Settings." As if, when I got it going again, over 2-4 iterations, XP decided to use a blank slate of settings for my "kuzzindoug" logon (an administrator profile)

So the Q is, how do I revert to the original kuzzindoug group of settings, and get rid of the others, which seem to have been automatically created, except without the desktop, favorites, etc. of the original?

 

[Guest]

Jim; What I did is get all the stuff from my smaller HDD copied over to the new one, using a v-com utility, and that now is all kopasetic. It transferred all apps and everything, and even contains the correct info for my profile in a file, which we will say is called "kuzzindoug" under "Documents and Settings" -which is identical to my logon profile name

Prob is, as I was fumbling with the utilities to do this, I managed to get it working 2-3 times (problems with the multi-boot MBR records), and each time XP set up a new file, with identical names, but adding first the computer name, then numerics, to distinguish between them [e.g., kuzzindoug=original, kuzzindoug.COMPUTERNAME=second iteration, kuzzindoug.COMPUTERNAME.OOO1=third iteration, etc.

The logon screen shows only kuzzindoug (really something else, but using fake name for security on this public forum), but appears to point to the last iteration of these dupe files. Except only the first one has my desktop settings, favorites, etc. For example, even though modem and drivers were all there, I had to sort of refresh those settings to get back online, and an auto update item, when clicked, said there was no modem installed. The later iterations did not reflect that virus updates already had been loaded earlier this week, so reloaded them. . . So, I want to get back to the original settings, which are in a folder, when I go thru the logon

BTW: Boot.ini does not show any different entries; it's just a basic one.