Completely Screwed

[Rico]

After reinstalling Gentoo, Windows XP refused to boot.

I had a bright idea... insert the setup CD and attempt to reinstall it. It offers to repair it for you. Now the weird thing is, Windows had installed on drive E. Not C. Well it turns out that XP stopped booting because the extra partitions Gentoo needs had altered Windows' perception of the drives, and it relettered E to C - and of course the OS couldn't work as all files were 'missing'.

Repair replaced all of Windows' files with new ones that pointed to C, so now Windows boots. That's good.

On the other hand, every other application, and some drivers, expect files on E and as such stopped working. I also have no sound at all. After changing startup entries in the registry from E to C, some more programs start up, but fail with dialog boxes.

In addition, I can't reinstall these programs because the uninstall programs are 'missing'.

I wanted to mount C: via NFS to E: so the drives were the same, but I can't. Windows won't let me letter a drive with E.

So I'm pretty much screwed... not really looking for a solution, just complaining. But if anyone has one it'd be nice. I'm searching the web right now, but I don't think anything useful will come out of it.

 

[woogal]

I had a similar problem when windows was installed onto a secondary drive, which was later swapped to be the primary drive. The solution (for my setup) was to configure grub like this -

title Windows 2000
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
root (hd1,0)
make active
chainloader +1

This makes windows think that it's running from hd1, when it is actually on hd0. I know that this situation is a bit different from yours, but playing around with map settings may help you fix your problem.

 

[Steve-O]

well, couldnt realy read it all because I have a battery charging next to me that im scared will explode on me.

But have you backed up your files ??

 

[Rico]

Sure, I could copy stuff over and reinstall. Instead:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...b;EN-US;Q223188

details how to change drive letters, or rather swap two around. So I'll do that. Yay.

 

[Dozer]

Rather than open another topic I'll ask here .

I have 2 harddisks, 1 6gig one and a 60gig one. I have win2k and some essential stuff installed on the 6gig and all my media and ramdom games and progs on the 60 gig. I want to remove the 6 though. Could I just copy the whole of the 6 gig to the root of the 60 then switch the jumper settings on the 60 to master and everything would boot fine?

That's worded like shite... I'm tired.

 

[generalnmx]

Sure at I could copy stuff over and reinstall. Instead:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...b;EN-US;Q223188

details how to change drive letters, or rather swap two around. So I'll do that. Yay.

​

The best way I've seen to get both XP and Linux on the same machine is by a manual harddrive switcher, where each operating system has one HDD.

Rather than open another topic I'll ask here .

I have 2 harddisks, 1 6gig one and a 60gig one. I have win2k and some essential stuff installed on the 6gig and all my media and ramdom games and progs on the 60 gig. I want to remove the 6 though. Could I just copy the whole of the 6 gig to the root of the 60 then switch the jumper settings on the 60 to master and everything would boot fine?

That's worded like shite... I'm tired.

​

No, Windows is evil and makes phantom changes to the boot record that are not easily changed manually. Anyway, I doubt that 60GB HDD is formatted as a System partition. You'll have to use a program like Partition Magic or Norton Ghost to change the partition tables after you copy over the stuff.

 

[Dozer]

Sure at I could copy stuff over and reinstall. Instead:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...b;EN-US;Q223188

details how to change drive letters, or rather swap two around. So I'll do that. Yay.

​

The best way I've seen to get both XP and Linux on the same machine is by a manual harddrive switcher, where each operating system has one HDD.

Rather than open another topic I'll ask here .

I have 2 harddisks, 1 6gig one and a 60gig one. I have win2k and some essential stuff installed on the 6gig and all my media and ramdom games and progs on the 60 gig. I want to remove the 6 though. Could I just copy the whole of the 6 gig to the root of the 60 then switch the jumper settings on the 60 to master and everything would boot fine?

That's worded like shite... I'm tired.

​

No, Windows is evil and makes phantom changes to the boot record that are not easily changed manually. Anyway, I doubt that 60GB HDD is formatted as a System partition. You'll have to use a program like Partition Magic or Norton Ghost to change the partition tables after you copy over the stuff.

​

So I can copy everything over, then change it to a system partition, change the jumpers, take out the 6 gig and all will be fine? Or am I not understanding?