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I did install successfully WXP with the original (well, modified) installation CD. I did find the SATA driver files on the mobo's CD, but it was in a format that the "F6 option" did not understand. I used the nLite program to modify the original installation CD, there I could add the driver files, and I also added the SP3 package as I saved that when it came out. Now I just have to see if the old system settings can be restored. Yes, the KDE Partition Manager in Linux gives you enough rope to hang yourself, as I amply have demonstrated that before! The KDE Partition Manager can resize/move a partition. I did expand one partition before successfully, though that partition was at the very end of the disk... Thanks again for the help! Regards, Peter

Hi RainyShadow, Thanks for your continued help! Ultimately I would like to restore my old system in a smaller partition. For that restore utility to run I need to have a running windows system. Last time I installed a 64-bit XP Pro, and restored all the files. The files are there, the XP system does not run. This is great step ahead, I see (and have) all my files from the XP system. I hoped that installing the 32-bit XP Pro system and restoring then I would have the files and the old system running. Hopefully installing that would not wrack the files already there, it took close to 9 hours to restore... You mentioned other ways to accomplish this, I need to go through of that again a couple of times to fully comprehend that. Where do I find a SATA drive to XP Pro and exactly how do I accomplish loading that. I think my 1.44 floppy is running here. The reason I went to all this trouble is that somehow from a few folders all the files on the XP partition disappeared. Not sure why, it is possible that the Linux system mocked it up (Ubuntu 18.04, KDE Plasma 5.12.9 frontend). I was starting to move over the XP user files to Linux, but was running out of space. The 1TB hard drive was split evenly between XP and Linux. The XP system uses up about 250GB. I need to rearrange the partitions, shrink the XP to 300GB, increase the Linux partition by the same. The first step was reducing the XP partition that I rushed into and ended up here... Thanks, Peter

About the install hang. I tried again to install the 32-bit XP Pro, this time I let the computer take its time. I left it at 20 minutes, still nothing, then went away for an hour and half long walk and by the time I got back the installation proceeded to the next stage. Unfortunately, next the installation could not find any hard disk partition. The mobo is about 12 years old and now the HD is a SATA hard drive. Does this installation CD recognize SATA drives? I do not recall it, but pretty sure I used this CD originally to install the OS. I vaguely recall that originally I had IDE hard drives and then I cloned the drive when I installed the large SATA HD. May be that is the explanation? Any chance I could "update" the installation CD with SP3, SP3 must have SATA drives in it. Any other solution? Any chance the installation hang time is related to the unrecognized hard drive? The 32-bit installation CD image that I downloaded has SP3 in it. I thought that if I have a valid authentication key it would work with any installation CD with the same product on it. As mentioned that downloaded CD would not take my valid key. Any way to extract a key from the installation CD itself? One can extract it from the installed OS. Thanks, Peter

Hello Everyone, I restored the system as RainyShadow suggested, I restored it over WXPPro 64-bit, but my system was 32-bit. All the files are there but the system would not start, it complains about corrupted files. I am not surprised, I have overwritten all the files. The question remains why my original installation CD would hang during installation once the initial files are loaded into RAM, as I asked before. I could repair the installation if the original installation CD worked. I dragged out an old Pentium-4 machine of mine, and the CD did install there just fine! Only difference in my machine where the CD would not work is that I increased the RAM to 8 Gig from 2Gig when installed Linux. Would that brake the installation? Thanks for the help! Peter

Hi, Thanks for the reply! I think the details of how I mocked up the WXP partition are irrelevant, I could not recover much from there, so I reformatted the partition, it is gone now. The XP disk clone is about two to three years old, the backup, that was done incrementally is about three weeks old. Clearly, I would like to get back the three weeks old state of the XP partition. The backup file I have is in the Windows .bkf file format. Some web-pages suggest that other OS than Windows XP could also restore using the .bkf file. The only thing is that I would like to restore the "whole XP system" and not just files. The ultimate would be a utility that would do that for me from Linux. I know, I am dreaming... Thanks, Peter

It was my fault. I tried to resize the partition from Linux, have not really thought it through... Did run chkdsk from a W7 installation, it barely recovered anything. After that I just reformatted the partition. Peter

Hello Everyone, New here... I need to restore my WXP partition that "went away" (I know, I should have known better...). It is a dual boot system, with Ubuntu the main OS. I kept WXP 32-bit in a partition as most of my files are still there, as well as a number of applications that does not really like to run under Linux. The WXP system was off the net. I also have a full backup of the WXP system on a USB external drive, using the built in backup tool of WXP. I would like to restore the partition and the WXP system, but in order to do that I need WXP running. The new NTFS partition is already created. I do have the XP installation disk with the key, but somehow when the new install loaded the files onto the ram disk and notifies that Windows is now starting, the whole thing just hangs there. Any reason for that? I did download another 32-bit installation disk image, but that does not take my original key. I also some time ago cloned the whole WXP disk when I had HDD trouble, I guess I could install that disk, boot from there, and restore the system to that now secondary drive with the new partition. Would that thing work? I also downloaded a 64-bit version of WXP, it installed into the new partition (someone posted the key to it), but that does not recognize the backup file from the 32-bit system (I am not really surprised). Any other options that I have? Thanks, Peter