Set up problem

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Guest

I had to replace my 20GB hard drive. I chose identical replacement. Had no
back up > had to start from scratch. XP Professional operating system manual
that came with the software suggested partitioning hard drive where you could
use the second partition for backing up files. This is what I chose to do. I
partitioned the drive as follows: 19GB in 1st Partition and 1 GB for the 2nd
and installed XP to the 19 GB portion and started installing my application
software. Everything worked very normally to this point. But the 1GB
partition was not yet formatted. I am new to XP (in the previous hard drive
that failed I used Win 2000) so I was not aware of the Disk Management
features of the XP. The only way I could think of making the small partition
available was by booting from the XP Professional disk and follow system set
up as I did for the main partition and my hope was that I could format the
small partition from there. Indeed, I could, but then there was no other
option but to install the XP operating system into that partition also to
finish the process. I thought, no problem, since in the manual it mentioned
about this how you could install even a different operating system into
different partitions, and then I thought I could uninstall XP from that
partition and be left with more room to back up the first partition stuff.
The problem I now have is that this computer now boots from that small
partition and I do not know how to get to use the main 19 GB partition for
booting where my applications also reside. XP's disk management sees that
partition and says it is "Healthy - Unknow partition." It does not have a
drive/volume letter assigned to it. The small partition is now the "System"
partition. Features of assigning drive letter designation are not available
when I right click on the 19 GB partition, but are grayed. Also, "Mark
Partition as Active" feature likewise is not available for that main
partition.
(The XP Professional that I have was not SP1 nor SP2, HOWEVER I upgraded the
main partition edition to SP1 online, and was ready to upgrade to SP2 except
my ZoneAlarm firewall needed to be upgraded first in order to be compatible
with the SP2 edition firewall. I did not have a chance to do that yet, before
the above problem came about. The small partition is merely the original XP
without any SP.)
Thank you for any help you can provide.

Novice
 
I continue with a bit more info: The only option in Disk Management available
to use is "Delete" partition. My concern is that if I delete the small
partition the computer might not boot at all since the small is the system
partition now. In DOS there was that command "sys C: D:" where you could make
another drive a system drive, but as mentioned the main partition does not
even have drive letter assigned to it. I'D NEED HELP A.S.A.P.

Thanks again.
 
Novice said:
I continue with a bit more info: The only option in Disk Management available
to use is "Delete" partition. My concern is that if I delete the small
partition the computer might not boot at all since the small is the system
partition now. In DOS there was that command "sys C: D:" where you could make
another drive a system drive, but as mentioned the main partition does not
even have drive letter assigned to it. I'D NEED HELP A.S.A.P.

Thanks again.

:
Click to expand...
If you're starting over, your best bet is to reboot using the XP CD and
use the setup program to delete the existing partition information and
create new partitions as you require. Go with at least 10GB for your
system partition.
 
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