formating failed Partitoned hard drive thru dos

Rollo Tamasi

i made a mistake tonight of adding 2000 to my pc after the installation of XP.
This results in boot problems. I can boot up win2k but i can't boot up XP. Which is great :rolleyes:

I have two drives:
C: - XP
- 2000

I want to go into dos and format , i believe the correct comand to format is: format d: /u . Can someone confirm this and also will formatting the drive fix my problem. I just want to get the pc back to normal asap and i will go back to the dual boot system later on.

Cheers

ChityWest

Rollo Tamasi wrote:

I want to go into dos and format , i believe the correct comand to format is: format d: /u . Can someone confirm this and also will formatting the drive fix my problem. I just want to get the pc back to normal asap and i will go back to the dual boot system later on.

Cheers

That is the command to do an unconditional format of the D drive - adding /u makes the format an unconditional one and will make it take a lot longer.

Is this one single hdd or two ? I dont think it will bring XP back again though as it looks like when you installed 2k it changed the mbr on the primary drive.

Rollo Tamasi

hi, i only want to format so i won't be going near XP which is on C:

andy1249

You need to clarify if you have 2 hard drives installed , or if you have one hard drive with 2 partitions.

It would seem that the MBR is going to be looking for win2000 now ,you dont seem to have installed a boot loader , so if you do have separate hard drives then formatting drive D wont help as the MBR is probably on C and will now look for win2000 and give an error message if it cant find it.

After the format of D try putting your XP disc into the CD drive and booting from it , then have it "repair" the installation on C , this should leave your data intact and hopefully point the MBR towards the XP installation.

Alternatively , you can temporarily disconnect D , assuming of course that you have two drives , and boot from your xp CD to repair the XP installation. This will save you having to format.

MunsterCycling

You just need to install a boot loader, google it, should be plenty of open source ones out there.

Alternatively you could reinstall / repair install the XP installation. Should allow you to see the bootloader options on start up

Esel

Go into DOS. Run 'format /?'.

This will explain all the options to you.

Sparky

I remember hearing something that if you wanted to dualboot windows, it was a case of installing the OS from win95 up.
So install win2000 then install windows XP.

I installed 2 versions of WinXP pro, one of which was a 64bit version, I had a problem where it didnt boot to the normal WinXP, so it was a case of me going into control panel>>>system>>>Advanced tab, then clicking on the startup and recovery settings.
I display the two OS for about 5seconds and I made XP pro the default OS.

Have you tried any of that under win2000?

Rollo Tamasi

thanks for the replies. I have two different hard drives. A bit of a problem would be that i have a windows xp cd but it isn't the one that is installed on the machine. Would this be a problem?

Changed the boot sequence in start up recovery to XP.

I will look into the boot loader now. Cheer

BTW, this is the error message i get when i attempt to boot up XP now:

Windows 2000 could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\WINDOWS\system32\config\systemd startup options for Windows 2000, Press F8.

You can attempt to repair this file by starting Windows 2000
Setup using the original setup floppy disc or Cd-Rom
Select r at the first screen to start repair

I am having a problem now booting from the windows 2000 cd, i get IO errors.

Any ideas? I just want XP back at this stage, couldn't give a rats arse about 2000.

Rollo Tamasi

problem resolved. Thank Christ! I copied NTLDR and Ntdetect from a XP cd to the root of the C: drive and it resloved the boot issues. XP+2000 now both work