Stephen R
December 5th 03, 12:39 AM
Does a full install of XP on an exisitng 2000 machine
that has boot problems overwite data on a single
partititioned NTFS hard disk?
____________________________________________
Backgroud:-
A friend who lives in a remote location has a Win2000 pro
installation that has corrupted and will not boot.
She has since bought Win XP Pro (full version) and would
like to install this but not overwite the data on drive c
as unfortunately she has not backed up in some time and
has data both in directories off the root and in
directories on her desktop (this is a 30Gb drive
partitioned as a single drive using NTFS).
As all attempts to fix the boot problem using Win 2000
recovery console have failed (fixboot, fixmbr, replacing
pagefile.sys etc) and she has not made an Emergency
Repair Disc. She can see data directories on the C:
drive but cannot change to anything but WINNT and entire
directories are way too big to copy onto floppies.
She has started an install using the XP CD and, as she
cannot start her existing operating system, is not
offered the choice of upgrading and can only perform a
full install. She went with this as far as setup asking
her about disk partitioning and chickened out worried
that this would format the hard drive. Does it?
At this moment I have told her to hold off and wait till
the end of next week when another tech minded friend is
visiting and have him remove the hard disk and run it as
a slave on another machine to save the data and this is
indeed a good option, however she is anxious to acces
some of the data as soon as possible to work on it.
If XP can clean install without overwiting the data she
can then save the precious data by transferring it to
another 2000 machine on her home network.
I would be extremely grateful for any advice.
Stephen
that has boot problems overwite data on a single
partititioned NTFS hard disk?
____________________________________________
Backgroud:-
A friend who lives in a remote location has a Win2000 pro
installation that has corrupted and will not boot.
She has since bought Win XP Pro (full version) and would
like to install this but not overwite the data on drive c
as unfortunately she has not backed up in some time and
has data both in directories off the root and in
directories on her desktop (this is a 30Gb drive
partitioned as a single drive using NTFS).
As all attempts to fix the boot problem using Win 2000
recovery console have failed (fixboot, fixmbr, replacing
pagefile.sys etc) and she has not made an Emergency
Repair Disc. She can see data directories on the C:
drive but cannot change to anything but WINNT and entire
directories are way too big to copy onto floppies.
She has started an install using the XP CD and, as she
cannot start her existing operating system, is not
offered the choice of upgrading and can only perform a
full install. She went with this as far as setup asking
her about disk partitioning and chickened out worried
that this would format the hard drive. Does it?
At this moment I have told her to hold off and wait till
the end of next week when another tech minded friend is
visiting and have him remove the hard disk and run it as
a slave on another machine to save the data and this is
indeed a good option, however she is anxious to acces
some of the data as soon as possible to work on it.
If XP can clean install without overwiting the data she
can then save the precious data by transferring it to
another 2000 machine on her home network.
I would be extremely grateful for any advice.
Stephen