Non-destructive re-install

[Guest]

I'm having some difficulty with win xp on a drive that had a new motherboard
installed. I'm getting the NTLDR is missing warning and nothing seems to fix
it. I'm thinking I need to do a re-install to fix the problem. The winxp disk
that was with the pc is not bootable and recovery console was not installed
on the drive. I've made the 6 disk boot set, but get an error with 'cannot
run bios.inf' or something like that.
Is there a way to do an install from dos that won't overwrite the existing
user settings? I also have an SP2 slipstreamed disk that boots. If I install
from this, will it overwrite or save the settings? Also, if I use this disk,
will it just write windows and leave the rest of the installed apps alone?
Thanks in advance.

 

[Ramesh, MS-MVP]

Hi Phil,

You may try this in XP_General and cross-post to Setup_deployment. Also,
this reference should be useful:

Changing a Motherboard or Moving:
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/moving_xp.html

 

[Peter]

Go down to "How to run a repair install" here:
http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/rep...s XP by Installing Over top of Existing Setup: