F4Phantom

Partitioning a HDD is a little more complicated than just making 4,5 or 6 partitions. You should take into account what your backup strategy is, what you are backing up to; ie cd's or dvd's, another Hdd, tape, etc, what kind of data you need to back-up, how often you plan to backup, make simple file backups or images. You need to do a web search of partitioning strategies. Black viper used to have a good treatise on the subject as well as a fellow named Fred Langa who writes a free subscription news letter called LangaList. A must read in my humble opinion. Good Luck.

OEM software was originally developed for small manufactorers. You usually purchase OEM software with various pieces of hardware. It is legal, licenseable, upgradeable, and doesn't cause problems with MS update. The one caveat to be aware of is that it is meant to be tied to the machine it is first installed on. Be sure to buy from a reputable reseller to insure that it is not a counterfeit copy or a corporate copy. If you upgrade enough hardware, you may have to call MS and get a new activation. Have done it many times without problem. Also have 3 copies of XP Pro on 3 different computers.

Autopartition changed from 1 to 0.

Unattended is meant to install windows. Some folks integrate the latest updates, drivers and programs to make the install as complete and as painless as possible. Reasons to re-install might be due to a virus, trojans, rootkits, or even badly written programs that have hosed the system.

It appears that you have loaded xp on partition C:\, then create partition E:\ which you mark as active. Since xp is not on E:, you can't boot to it, hence the missing ntldr message. Make C:\ active.