[Novalug] urgent windows problem

Jon LaBadie novalugml@jgcomp.com
Mon Jun 23 23:38:35 EDT 2008


Sorry for a windows posting on a linux list.
I'm desparate for a quick reply and don't
subscribe to any windows lists.

My wife's home computer is also used for some
of her business activites.  In trying to "fix"
it, I instead screwed it up.

Her C drive was too small, even though she puts
most of her data on the D drive.  As a solution I
purchased a second, larger drive and planned to
move both partitions to the new disk with a much
larger partition for the C drive.

I installed the disk, and used WD's supplied
software to create two partitions.  The software
also offered to move the system drive to the
new disk so I said yes.  Then the troubles started.
Something hiccuped early in the transfer, I'm
guessing only about 1GB was transfered.  But it
was only copying I THOUGHT, so no real harm.

But when I tried to reboot, I got the normal black
WinXP Home screen, then it clears and goes to the
light blue screen and stays there with no messages.

I don't have WinXP Home disks (oem preinstalled)
but I did have WinXP Pro disks.  I tried to play
with the recovery console to no avail.  Finally
I decided to "install" WinXP Pro onto the new
drive.  Now the multi-boot menu shows both the
Home and Pro versions and both boot.  Sounds
good, but not really.

The WinXP Home partition that used to be C: is
now drive K:.  When booted into XP Home %userroot%
and all other environment variables are based on
K:.  But it looks as if many many applications have
some hard coded C: paths in their configs.  So
virtually nothing works.  Notably, office and outlook.

So, any idea what went wrong and how/if I can get
back to working, short of a total reinstall?  And if
I do reinstall, what configs need to be preserved
some way, such as where is outlook's address book and
any office configs?

Don't hesitate to call the number below or email
direct to avoid cluttering the list with windows stuff.


Another odd tidbit.  I thought I might change the drive
letters using disk management.  But the WinXP Pro
partition contains the pagefile and can't be renamed.

And there are autochanging drive letters.  If I'm
booted into XP Pro its windows drive is labeled J:
and the old disk's partitions are named C: & D: just 
as they were originally.  Yet when booted into XP Home,
the old disk's C: becomes K: and the new disk's
partitions goes from J: to C:.

Thanks for any help.

Jon
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon@jgcomp.com
  JG Computing
  12027 Creekbend Drive		(703) 787-0884
  Reston, VA  20194		(703) 787-0922 (fax)



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