3 replies to this topic

[killswitch92]

im visiting my mother and soon as i walk through the door she told me her computer problems lol.
the story goes, she updated windows xp and when she restarted her computer it would boot up to the windows is loading screen then shut down and reboot, and repeat this over and over so she tried reinstalling windows over it thinking it would overwrite it. well it just installed windows xp again as another partition on the same harddrive. but i was able to get into the older partition of xp in safe mode without it rebooting and all the things she saved/downloaded r still there. is there anyway i can transfer the data from the older xp partition to the newer? in either one i boot up it says that its on the C drive, so i cant really just go through the files and find the other xp partition. i thought of transfering it to another harddrive then transfer it back but i dont have anything i can use with me =/

anybody have any ideas? maybe i could even downgrade the update she installed somehow?
any help is greatly appreciated

[ajua]

You can use a bootable Linux distro to copy any files from the corrupt install partition to the one she made or boot into the one she made in safe mode and copy the files from there if you can see them.

Then, delete the corrupt partition (Aomei Partition Assistant Home Edition or EaseUs Partition Master are free) and merge the now available space to the working partition. After that, edit the Windows bootloader to get no prompts to choose which installation you want to boot since now you have only one. For that you can use Visual BCD Editor.

That's the solution I can think of right now. Let us know how it goes.

[+BudMan]

If you can get one booted - then just mount the other partition as different drive letter in disk manager

I would pull her files off to different disk, usb stick, etc. And install whatever OS she wants clean. So she was upgrading to XP?? From what?

What other partition was there that she could of installed too? So she had un-partitioned space on her drive?? WTF?

[Detection]

Are you sure it has definitely installed on a separate partition?

If it had, there should be 2 HDDs shown in 'My Computer', C will normally be whichever one you are booted into, and D,E,F whatever will be the other one which you could just go into and copy normally from drive to drive, or in this case partition to partition

It sounds unlikely that she would have managed to correctly partition the drive during XP setup,

It almost sounds as if she has installed to the same partition without formatting, which 'should' have left a C:\windows.old folder with the old install and all her data inside of

Not sure how it is allowing you to boot back into it though