Replacing OEM WinXP Home with WinXP Pro

[Knack]

Hi. Want to redo the setup aon my laptop and dump the OEM WinXP Home for a
fresh (not upgrade version) of WinXP Pro. I also wish to install a parallel
WinXP Pro on a 2nd primary partition for various administrative reasons. I
previously thought the laptop contained only a single gigantic partition-C
with no unassigned space. However, upon running setup I see that
there's also detected:

At the very "beginning" of the drive a 7MB unpartitioned space. I assume
that's where the MBR is located.

Between the above space and partition-C there's something that Setup
designates as "Partition" and is briefly described to be "Windows fault
tolerant". It occupies 44 MB. It has no drive letter and colon; but a hyphen
and colon. It's not visible in Windows Explorer.

I'm the original owner of this Hewlett-Packard laptop, and I never had a
mirrorring arrangement. So what is that otherwise invisible 44MB "partition"
doing there? Does it have something to do with the way HP cloned the HDD
setup? Do I still need it if I'm reinstalling WinXP Pro from scratch? Setup
makes it possible for me to delete that fault tolerant "partition". Should I
do so? Keep in mind that I wish to avoid complications.

Also, I'd like to leave 1000MB of unassigned space between the 2 primary
NTFS
partitions that will contain the normal and parallel OSes. Is this possible?
If so, Do I have to create that space between the two primary partitions via
Partition Magic, or can it be done somehow in WinXP Setup?

 

[Randy Byrne [MVP]]

You have indeed located a hidden partition that HP installs. HP uses this partition
for various functions from doing the recovery to updating the bios firmware. Visit
HP's web site to get specific details.

I completely wiped out all of the partitions and created one on my HP laptop. When
you do that, you lose some of the functionality of the HP tools and possibly HP
support.

--

Randy Byrne
Microsoft MVP - Setup/Deployment
http://support.microsoft.com/support/mvp
Associate Expert
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone
Do not email me, please use the newsgroup so that everyone benefits.