Rebooting ploblems!

B

Bluefish

Registered User
Messages
14
Hi all,

I have an oldish (P2) limted Acer laptop. And I was running the original windows 98 from the C drive and Windows XP from the D drive. When I was rebooting the laprtop an option would pop up asking which to run (XP or 98), As the machine is limited I was forever running out of disk space so decided to invest in a external hardrive (as all the laptop is used for is iPod music, pictures, and the odd bit of surfing the net)

Well stupidly I moved the entire contents of the C drive to the external disk drive, thinking I would be left with the XP on the D drive. But when I rebooted after the transfer and subsequently I am getting error messages.

Any help to resolve this would be appreciated. If the worse case senario I have to reload XP again will I loose entire contents of the D drive?

Bluefish
 
Bluefish said:
But when I rebooted after the transfer and subsequently I am getting error messages.
Click to expand...
The actual text of the error messages might help!

How exactly did you move the contents of C: to the USB drive? Were you expecting things to work so that the dual boot which previously chose between W98 on the C: drive/partition and XP on the D: drive/partition would magically now choose between W98 on the USB drive and XP on the D: drive/partition? What did you do with the original C: drive/partition after moving (copying?) stuff to the USB drive?
 
"The actual text of the error messages might help!"


Well I knew that would come up, as I cant post from home (pc issue) I dont remember the exact error message but will post it up later. The contents were moved by USB to the external drive.

"Were you expecting things to work so that the dual boot which previously chose between W98 on the C: drive/partition and XP on the D: drive/partition would magically now choose between W98 on the USB drive and XP on the D: drive/partition"

I was Magically expecting there just to be an option to access the the XP on the D drive(dont want to access the 98 version into the future). But as I am by no means an expert that was obviously incorrect and hence I am looking for some advice

"What did you do with the original C: drive/partition after moving (copying?) stuff to the USB drive"

Everything I moved (not copied) is on the external hard drive.
 
I dont know if you tried changing the 'boot sequence' to D: drive at start up?
R
 
Bluefish said:
The contents were moved by USB to the external drive.
Click to expand...
But how! Using Windows Explorer or Xcopy or something?
I was Magically expecting there just to be an option to access the the XP on the D drive(dont want to access the 98 version into the future).
Click to expand...
What did you do with the C: drive after moving the contents to the USB drive? Unless you reformatted it then the dual boot master boot record should probably still exist and allow you to choose between the (now missing) W98 and XP on the D: drive. If you did reformat/repartition C: then chances are you no longer have a bootable machine. You may be able to restore the MBR to allow XP on D: to boot but it will probably not be a trivial matter and will require a certain amount of technical expertise.
 
Oh - are C: and D: actually physically separate hard disks or are they partitions on a single hard disk?
 
When you start up a legacy W9x pc you should have a message before windows comes up as 'F1' to access the boot up routines. Within this you will have either a tab or an option for 'boot'. Scroll the options you will see the boot sequence and maybe change this to start with D:
I dont think you have the boot routines on D: since you copied C: drive as these are only installed from the CD and not copyable I think.
You may have to get a Win9x CD and boot from this or install basic windows again on the C: drive.
You can create a Win9x boot floppy on another PC and use this if you wish.
Its pretty straightforward.
Search on Microsoft for the proceedure, if ure still stuck will look it up.
R
 
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