Hello everybody.

I'm new at this forum, and don't know if this topic was discused earlier.

The fact is my brother had a computer with one hard disk and 2 partitions (units C and D). In C he had Win 98 an in D had XP. He decided to erase Win 98, so deleted everything under C:\Windows, C:\Program Files, etc. In other words, he left the files in the root of C drive and other directories.

Then tried to move all XP files from D to C, and edited BOOT.INI (situated in C) to leave only one boot option.

He couldn't find a way to tell the loading process that now it should take windows XP files from C. He believed that it would be done automatically.

NOTE: To move system (in use) files he installed a second hd with another XP installed, and boot from it.

When he restored the other disk as the default, the system didn't boot, telling something about a missing system file (dll or something like that)

Does somebody know how can he get his system running again?

Thank you very much for your help.

Ace.

If you just move the XP installation from D to C, it won't boot and work properly because all the paths in the registry would be all wrong (including the entries relating to the drive letter and page file).

Your best bet is just do a clean install on C.

You can move it back and run XP from d and use c for data. Should be no problem there. It may be too late though. Keeping a copy of XP on d and reformat & rebuild on c is a good idea though. It's always good to start fresh for me.

You are really in a hot soup! Reason is fairly simple, XP doesn't rely on the path options like Win98 does, where by simply changin the related entries in msdos.sys, autoexe.bat and registry you attain the path of the new windows location. Windows xp, whereas relies on the relation of the drive/partition format. Which in simple words is not equal to c: or d: at many place in the system files. Thus even if you move the entire Winxp to a newer location, and changed the related occurrances of d: to c:, it still would seek the windows xp directory located in D:.

But options like partitionmagic etc moving the drive etc. can be tried out.

Ok, that's everything I suposed him to do. Thank you anyway, I'll tell my brother to buy a knife :)