Multiboot XP migration issues

[brycecohan]

Hi,

This might not be a big problem but I can't figure out how to tackle it on my own.

I have a PC with 2 HDD's, a 250 GB Sata, and 160GB IDE. My setup historically was: 60 gig partition on the Sata for booting. I had one version of windows installed.

Recently I added to more partitions to the 160GB IDE bringing it to a total of four. The 2 new partitions were 5 and 15 GB respectively. I installed 2 more versions of windows XP on those, Micro XP on the 5GB and a nlite trimmed version of XP on the 15GB. At that point I had 2 partitions on my SATA, a 60GB and a ~190 GB, and 4 partitions on my IDE. When I booted up I had three OS's to choose from.

The problem is that I wanted to replace the 60GB XP partition with the 15GB installation as my primary. I reformatted the 60GB partition without thinking thoroughly and thus deleted the only boot file on my system, because that 60GB partition was my original windows install.

I got my computer back up and running by installing fresh onto the 60GB but I want to move the 15GB installation over to it, instead of starting fresh. Is there anyway to do this?

The other installations are no longer being detected.

Sorry for the ridiculously long post...

[BipolarBill]

No - you can't just move partitions around. The BOOT.INI file says where all versions of Windows are installed. There is only one BOOT.INI and it's one the first active partition - your 60GB. If you erase it, none of the Windows versions will be found. The 16GB "lite" XP has no BOOT.INI file. Besides, that partition is not bootable.

This is all more involved than you think it is. There is more data and information on any drive or partition than you can "see". It's hidden data that makes a drive bootable.

If you want a "lite" version of XP on your first partition, you have to install it there first from a bootable CD.

Now - about your "lost" boot selections. You may be able to salvage them by manually editing the BOOT.INI file on the first partition and adding entries for them. It's really hard for a beginner.

How to edit the Boot.ini file in Windows XP

In the example, note the "paths" to the OS installations. In your case, your 60GB partition location is:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

The OS on the second partition would be:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\...

An OS on the first partition of the second hard drive would look like this:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\...

If you add lines in the BOOT.INI that match where your other installations were and use proper names after the backslash (...\Windows=Micro XP) so that you can tell what is what, you can get it all back.

Rather than using your second hard drive for more operating systems, maybe you should use it to back up your first drive in case you mess up again:

Free Drive Backup Express - disk backup software

It's free.