I can see and manage my ME Drive in XP!

I have never had this problem before when dual booting ME with XP or W2K. I needed to instal XP on my backup machine because my new XP machine has a hardware breakdown and I am waiting for them to repair it under Warranty. I really like XP and was missing it.

I deleted my W2K Server partition(used for study purposes)using PM7 and ran my XP Home CD and elected to repartition the space with NTFS. I noticed it came up as Drive F whereas W2K and ME had both been Drive C and hidden from each other. I also have a Logical Drive D Storage, my CD Drive is M by default. The Boot is managed by XP even though I had Boot Magic set up.

Now, when in XP I can not only see my ME Drive but manage it from XP and when I bring up System Restore etc I see my ME drive too. I am sure it is not a good idea that I can also defragment and scan my ME drive in XP! In effect, when in XP my ME drive has become a managed folder? With XP being NTFS and ME FAT32 I am worried about file and Registry corruption.

What did I do wrong and how can I rectify matters so that both ME and XP dual boot as Drive C as before? I have not customised XP yet and if need be I can reinstal.

The machine I am using is HP Pavilion 6712 with Intel Celeron 667mhz processor and 128MB RAM. The main OS is ME which is preinstalled. The BIOS is Phoenix.

Well, some educated guesses maybe..I don't think you have to worry about file and data corruption because of the difference between ntfs and fat32..winxp is more than capable of running on either file allocation table type. Windows xp by default looks for other installed operating systems and sets up that dual boot configuration by making drive c the system boot drive..if you look in drive c directory, you will probably find a boot.ini file installed by xp. In order to get your boot magic to work again, and possibly get your winME folder hidden again, I would uninstall and then reinstall boot magic on the root directory of the C drive. This should give you the option to hide the xp partition and get boot magic to be the default boot manager. If you have problems after this, you may need to edit the boot ini file..let me know

I think you may be worrying about something that you shouldn't. All of my dual boots have been setup this way. In fact the only time I couldn't manage all partitions with a dual boot was with NT4 and win98. NT 4.0 setup with NTFS, and 98 FAT32. This was a limitation at that time, but since windows 2k (NT5) came out that problem no longer exists. I have also never used Partition Magic except to extend a volume, simply because I wanted to see it done. You shouldn’t need it for a basic installation. The NT/2k/XP setup is capable of repartitioning or formatting an existing partition just fine.

On the flip side, the old dual boot you referred to, ME and 2k...the fact that one partition was hidden from the other when booting to different OS's alarms me more that the problem you are concerned with currently.

To address your concerns (I_know, “finally”); just don’t go over board with any disk management from one OS to the other’s partition, and try not to install programs for one OS into the other OS’s partition. You should feel free to use either drive for general storage however. And don’t upgrade any disks to Dynamic! (Dynamic vs. Basic Storage in Windows 2000 )

I have just completed a successful dual boot reinstal. I was completely locked out, could not boot to any OS so I ran my ME factory instal recovery discs(ME is the default OS)and then installed XP on a new partition. They are now dual booting the way I want under Boot Magic.

The Windows disk management way does not work because my primary partition is ME and that does not have disk manangement like NT/2K/XP. It bombs every time I try to use it and I always end up using Partition Magic and Boot Magic.

I am leaving this dual boot alone, activating this spare copy of XP and dumping my course because I am fed up with computers. Problems, problems, problems and it is making me really ill. I am fed up with them going wrong. I am obviously a dimwit.

Thanks for all your support everyone.

Grangeek, a brave try... but have they got under your skin? Can you leave the problem and walk away and forget it? Will you never wonder if you tried something else it would work? Or are you like the rest of us hapless techs? Always learning, always tinkering, always breaking it and then fixing it again.

There is no such thing as a well behaved computer.. and if you want to find out more than is necessary to play solitaire, then you will go through this.

What you are expecting I think, is that the damn things will work the same way day in day and the same fixes will work day in day out... they don't.

If you can leave them alone, be happy with ME and solitarie and the odd email, then yes, walk away... but I bet you can't ;)

I think the W2K Networking course is getting to me Noo Noo. It is getting really hard now, two years course rolled into one, C & G Level 3 and MCP the goal. My deafness is beginning to be a nuisance but our teacher is moving me and my computer(we all seem to have adopted a particular machine)somewhere where I can see him, the whiteboard, the projected image of his Server and face my computer all at once. I want so hard to succeed maybe even do the MCP if I do OK in the dummy exams.

I am the sort of person who hates defeat and I am my own hardest critic and get very embarrasssed when I get these problems with my PCs. But I always recover don't I and I have learned so much from all you here and my course and my books and my email friend.

I know where I went wrong this time, I have ME and XP dual booting on this backup PC and running really good now but yes you are right I cannot walk away and in fact I get bored if my PC runs well for too long and have a need to poke about:cool:

Support are coming to fix the hardware fault in my new PC on Monday and I will watch him if he does not mind and learn because when the Warranty is up I will have to repairs myself like I did my husband's CDROM drive recently. Guess I am not so stupid after all but there is so much to learn.

No, I cannot walk away Noo Noo, the geek bit is too strong now and after all I have been a radio ham for nearly 16 years, must be in me!

If all PCs behaved I guess we would be bored out of our minds:bor:

Now Gran if you want a really frustrating problem try this...

The only capture card you have is an 8mb pci ATI all in wonder Rage II running on a duron 800 with 320mb ram - ata133 hard drive, 100tx network.

You can use any software and codecs you can get your hands on...

Your brief is to create an hour long capture that is roughly cd sized (but not necessarily svcd or vcd format) and that when you watch it in full screen mode on a 19" it does not look "blocky"

Your problems are that the only decent copy is ATI's mp2 format. The other formats don't work because of the 2gig files limitation on fat32.. ATI knows this to be a limitation and will therefore not allow you to capture more than 10-20 mins at a time. Added to that you want to edit the rubbish out - nothing likes ATI's mp2 format and ATI's own video editor won't read it either. If you try an record in mp2 it crashes indiscriminately with a resvmgr message... or just hangs... and finally when you get an mp2 file ready and put it through an encoder to change the file to something the editors will read, it screws up the sync on the sound....

All you want to do is record an hours worth of stuff, edit about 10 minutes from it and bung it on a cd... whats so damned hard about that???? :flame:

My current solution to this problem is ebay - gonna buy a decent capture card after a week of playing with this particular sows ear!

Blimey! and I thought I had problems. I feel better already

I do wish you luck with the new card Noo Noo :) :D

Hang in there Gran Geek, Computers are like people, One fix does not fix them all
I finally got my system working good ( Win XP Home single boot ) I did the stupid click and deleted my boot.ini file, I bypassed the recycle bin so she's gone
I don't dare shut down, I may just let her run all night and see if I can find a text copy of a boot.ini file and write a new one
I can't remember the exact parameters , Maybe could you post the text from you XP boot.ini
That would really help me out and spare me reparing or reinstalling XP
Thanks in advance, I may go to the MS site and look for a text copy
Hope you do well in you classes :)

Hi format c:

I don't think a copy of my boot.ini will help you because I am using my other machine and dual booting ME/XP with Boot Magic and the file has replaced anything in the two OS and you say you are single booting. My main XP computer is disconnected because I am waiting for a support tech to come and check it out under the Warranty. It is really bad and I would not vouch for the boot.ini or anything else being good may even be the main board. Anyway I don't want to boot it up again until the tech is here and tells me to.

I know what it is like not to be able to boot and having to reinstall the OS in order to do so and I recently had such a corrupt partition after playing around that I ended up with my whole disc a non DOS partition and had to use my DOS 6.2 floppies to instal DOS before I could use my factory recovery disks.

I am very sorry I cannot be more helpful and perhaps someone with a good single boot XP could paste their boot.ini here for you - anyway good luck and thank you for your wishes. The classes are getting really hard now but we have a very good teacher, the sort who makes you feel each one of us matters.

One boot.ini from a single boot machine:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Micro soft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect


Enjoy :D

Glad you could help "format c:", thought you might come to the rescue Noo Noo! I have also pasted a copy in Notepad to file under my useful bits and pieces for XP - might need it myself one day as new machine(the one that has broken down under warranty) is and will remain a single boot XP machine.

Thanks Noo Noo I found a copy on the MS site I just had to change it to Windos XP home, I held my breath on the reboot, It all came back up
Problem solved , thanks again

It's kind of ironic that your screen name is format c: and you needed help after deleting an important file.:D

One of those bad mouse clicks, :)

Quote:

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Originally posted by format c:
Hang in there Gran Geek, Computers are like people, One fix does not fix them all
I finally got my system working good ( Win XP Home single boot ) I did the stupid click and deleted my boot.ini file, I bypassed the recycle bin so she's gone
I don't dare shut down, I may just let her run all night and see if I can find a text copy of a boot.ini file and write a new one
I can't remember the exact parameters , Maybe could you post the text from you XP boot.ini
That would really help me out and spare me reparing or reinstalling XP
Thanks in advance, I may go to the MS site and look for a text copy
Hope you do well in you classes :)

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By the way. Norton 2003 Professional comes included with a program called "Norton protected recycle bin" and it will integrate with your recycle bin. This will easily allow you to undelete deleted files. It may help you out in the future. :D