AARGH! Help! :(

[S-Gray]

Well, i had WinXP on my First Partition (C but i just formatted my Computer and installed Win98 on it (D but now i cant access my C: Drive when i reset my computer!

How do i get back onto WinXP when i want too?!?! *cry* HELP!!111111

 

[~YuckFou~]

Originally posted by Super_Gray[SG]
Well, i had WinXP on my First Partition (C but i just formatted my Computer and installed Win98 on it (D but now i cant access my C: Drive when i reset my computer!

How do i get back onto WinXP when i want too?!?! *cry* HELP!!111111

Can't access c: or can't boot from c:?

 

[S-Gray]

Oh, erm i cant Boot from the C: Drive, i can access it...

My bad

 

[Pro]v[etheus]

Because you installed Win98 on your other partition, it has screwed up the Boot.ini file. Somewhere along the way you also lose a few other files important to loading WinXP(NT based O/S), one such file being NTLOADER. As far as i am aware you have 2 options to gain access to WinXP:

1. Use your ERD (Emergency Recovery Disk) which im sure you made , this will repair the Boot.ini etc.

2. Failing that you will have to reinstall WinXP (system files only)


If im wrong then im sure certain members of the forum community will shoot me down

Hope this helps, also try here Repairing dual boot systems

 

[S-Gray]

Installing Windows 2000 on a system with Windows XP already installed is possible,
however, after installation, you will need to 'fix' the boot record on your root
drive.
You will need to boot up with your WinXP CD and follow these steps:

Choose the 'Repair' an existing installation.
You will be asked to choose which windows installation you want to repair(the WinXP
Recovery Console will see both the Xp and 2000 installations)
Type in your Administrator password.

Follow these steps:

1) Type FIXBOOT, answer (Y)es
2) CD \, press enter.(this takes you to the root drive)

Type and enter thes commands on at a time:

3) ATTRIB -H NTLDR
4) ATTRIB -S NTLDR
5) ATTRIB -R NTLDR
6) ATTRIB -H NTDETECT.COM
7) ATTRIB -S NTDETECT.COM
8) ATTRIB -R NTDETECT.COM

In steps 9 and 10, X is the letter of your CD-Rom drive.

9) COPY X:\I386\NTLDR C:\
10) COPY X:\I386\NTDETECT.COM C:\

Answer yes each time the computer asks to overwrite the existing file. Type EXIT
to close
the repair console and reboot your computer. You should now be able to boot into
whichever
O\S you choose.

These steps should work if you can get someone's WinXp disk, not a system restore
which they give with new systems. If you are able to follow these steps, you will
have your dual-boot system.

Will this fix it if anyone knows?

 

[Pro]v[etheus]

SG, i just tested that link to make sure it worked and it caused my PC to reboot, hope you don't have the same problem

 

[kameleon]

If you want a dual 98 and xp system, you have to install 98 as your primary partition. You cant (as i suspect you have) install xp first on ntfs and the install 98 on a fat partition. 98 wont recognise ntfs drives. It sucks but thats the way it is.

 

[S-Gray]

Its all sorted now, that stuff i posted above did the trick thankfully...

Both Partitions were FAT anyway, but thankye all for your help

At least its one for the future if anyone else has problems

 

[S-Gray]

Hmm... i just tried accessing my Win98 Partition... and upon hitting enter on the Dual Boot screen (To select which OS i wanna run) i get this "error"...

I/O Error Accessing Boot Sector File

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

I know this has something to do with my Boot.ini in WinXP, so i went into MSconfig (Start > Run) and it says:

[Boot Loader]
timeout=3
Default=C:\
[Operating Systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /Fastdetect
C:\="Microsoft Windows 98"

ABove i think it should read D:\="Microsoft Windows 98"

Thing is it wont let me modify it within MSConfig...

 

[Testin da Cable]

do the attrib thing, but then with boot.ini as the target and edit the file. don't forget to switch the attributes back after you're finished.

 

[Mortifier]

NTFS = crap

perhaps becouse its converted to ntfs.

When I was trying to get that bs os out of my system. I couldnt format becouse it wouldnt format my NTFS partition as a FAT32 partition, so I deleted the ntfs partition and created a new dos partition. It could even find my c: from dos.