WinXP system volume separate from boot volume 1

[rs387]

Hi! My 20Gb HDD has two partitions, of which one has the OS and the other has some data. The primary partition is mounted as C: and the secondary is mounted into an NTFS folder on an 80Gb HDD. All partitions are NTFS.

After reinstalling WinXP into the primary partition (which was duly reformatted) I realised that Boot volume which has all the Windows files was installed into C, but a couple of files (ntldr, ntdetect) were installed onto the secondary partition, making it the System partition. I didn't ask for that! Now I can't change drive letters. Any ideas why WinXP decided to install Boot & System into different partitions?

I'm going to reformat the whole thing because then it definitely works, but I would still like to know why it did what it did. Thanks!

 

[wolluf]

How did you do the reformat/reinstall? (did you remove the first partition before you started)?

I don't know why this happened - but would guess that somehow the second partition was the active partition at the time that XP writes its boot sector - don't know why - unless you had removed the first partition before starting install. I do know nt/2k/xp have all surprised me during the install process when there have been a number of partitions/drives in the machine (about where they put their boot sectors).

 

[rs387]

Yes I did remove the first partition and then created it again. This doesn't happen if I delete both partitions and then create both again from setup. But if I leave the second partition as it was, WinXP decides that it wants that to be its System partition.

I doubt there was any way of the second partition becoming active. Although a second thought gave me an idea. Perhaps once the active partition is deleted, winxp makes the first available partition active so that at least one partition is active at any one time. That would explain it.

But then there seems to be no way to activate a given partition from windows setup. So maybe I have to go to recovery console before the setup, do all partitions, and then start installation?

 

[wolluf]

I agree with 'Perhaps once the active partition is deleted, winxp makes the first available partition active ' as likely explanation. Also, that setting up and making active partition you want to install into if you have other partition(s) on the drive is a good idea. You could also try hiding the existing (second) partition during the install process. Various apps will do this - eg,

http://www.lpacomputers.telinco.co.uk/PD.zip

or

http://www.boot-us.com

has boot manager & dos apps.. XP can actually detect a hidden partition, but I know from experience it will not put its boot sector on it.