Hi.
Following reinstallation of XP home, I now have a partitioned hard disk with XP installed in the partition F:
Partition sizes,
C: 8 GB
F: 52 GB
I am able to delete the data in C and acquire a partitioning program to remove or resize the partitions.
What is the best way to make C: my primary bootable drive?
(I’m looking for some smart answers here! I know I can reinstall XP, but I would like a smarter way.)
What do you want to do with this partition? Install another OS?
As long as the formatting of drive C: doesn’t affect your bootsector (it shouldn’t), you could edit XP’s “boot.ini” (to be found in the root of your Windows partition, drive F in your case) to make the boot from partition C: possible. Just open the boot.ini and edit it (with Notepad for example).
It should look like this:
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
You can (of course) add bootable partitions by adding lines like:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
Hope this is what you mean…!
Also, did you set it as active?
Do a fdisk /mbr to get rid of all other bootmanagers.
Then startup fdisk or similar program to make it active.
If it’s NTFS , i suggest Partition Magic.