Post by Gamesoul Master on Dec 13, 2007 15:40:03 GMT -5
Alright. This is a problem that requires the help of somebody familiar with partitions.
A few days ago, I decided that I needed to start out fresh again. So what I did was I resized my main (and only) partition, seeing as how I hadn't gotten around to running multiple partitions on this machine yet. So with my 120 GB hard drive, I reduced the partition by 10 GB. My plan was to make a new partition and install onto that, so that I could simply wipe the previous install off the main partition and leave that as my storage one. I have so much stuff on the hard drive that I really don't want to lose, that without a sufficiently sized second hard drive, this was the only plausable way to handle this. And I only had about 15 GB free, so 10 GB was about as high as I could go.
Now here's where I may have made a stupid mistake. Because I recall from back in my Win98 days that OS's can only be installed on a primary partition, I created a primary partition out of that new unallocated space. I then set it as the active partition, restarted the computer, and started the install of XP. Oddly, the computer booted to XP "normally" at this point. Tons of errors popped up about missing files after logging in, and then it restarted itself (probably due to lacking enough files to even run). It had even showed my profiles from the original XP that was installed. That itself was weird enough and cause for concern.
I started the install again, once again to the new partition. This time it went through the full install process, which is good. It even shows the dual boot menu when I start the computer. Only problem is... Well, the understandable problem is that I can't access the 110 GB partition at all. I didn't realize that would happen, but upon reading up on it, I now know that only one primary partition can be visible at one time. The problem is that even if I boot the original install of XP, it still boots from the 10 GB partition, and I still get some of those error messages (though it runs pretty stable). Not many traces of the original install when I do that either.
What I *really* need help with... is getting to that 110 GB partition. My first instinct was to find a way to convert it to an extended/logical partition. But I'm wondering just how hard or impossible that may be. So what I'm wondering is... what possible methods do I have available to me to allow my 10 GB partition to see that 110 GB partition? I'm really in need of some help on this, since I need access to some of my files. And I'd rather ask here first, amongst people I know and respect, than start trying forums where I know nobody and may end up getting a lot of sarcastic and otherwise unhelpful responses.
A few days ago, I decided that I needed to start out fresh again. So what I did was I resized my main (and only) partition, seeing as how I hadn't gotten around to running multiple partitions on this machine yet. So with my 120 GB hard drive, I reduced the partition by 10 GB. My plan was to make a new partition and install onto that, so that I could simply wipe the previous install off the main partition and leave that as my storage one. I have so much stuff on the hard drive that I really don't want to lose, that without a sufficiently sized second hard drive, this was the only plausable way to handle this. And I only had about 15 GB free, so 10 GB was about as high as I could go.
Now here's where I may have made a stupid mistake. Because I recall from back in my Win98 days that OS's can only be installed on a primary partition, I created a primary partition out of that new unallocated space. I then set it as the active partition, restarted the computer, and started the install of XP. Oddly, the computer booted to XP "normally" at this point. Tons of errors popped up about missing files after logging in, and then it restarted itself (probably due to lacking enough files to even run). It had even showed my profiles from the original XP that was installed. That itself was weird enough and cause for concern.
I started the install again, once again to the new partition. This time it went through the full install process, which is good. It even shows the dual boot menu when I start the computer. Only problem is... Well, the understandable problem is that I can't access the 110 GB partition at all. I didn't realize that would happen, but upon reading up on it, I now know that only one primary partition can be visible at one time. The problem is that even if I boot the original install of XP, it still boots from the 10 GB partition, and I still get some of those error messages (though it runs pretty stable). Not many traces of the original install when I do that either.
What I *really* need help with... is getting to that 110 GB partition. My first instinct was to find a way to convert it to an extended/logical partition. But I'm wondering just how hard or impossible that may be. So what I'm wondering is... what possible methods do I have available to me to allow my 10 GB partition to see that 110 GB partition? I'm really in need of some help on this, since I need access to some of my files. And I'd rather ask here first, amongst people I know and respect, than start trying forums where I know nobody and may end up getting a lot of sarcastic and otherwise unhelpful responses.