XP home upgrade to XP pro gone wrong

[ATST]

I had a machine I got second hand. Took it down to nothing and put the previous owners copy of XP home on it.
I decided to up grade to XP pro, so I bought the upgrade copy. I upgraded, and it was fine. A few hours later, while I was surfing the mouse froze. The three fingered solute produced no effect, so I rebooted. Now teh machine won't boot. It appears to be looking for win 98 files that aren't there.
I tried to do a reinstall of XP pro.
I tried a win 98 start up disk, but XP won't install in DOS.
I tried a win ME start up disk, but no go.
Then I made a XP pro start up disk, (4.4 MB DL took forever on son's PC) and it will work, but when it said there are 30 gigs free on it (and wanted me to format the disk) I quit right there!
I went back to C:\ and entered "dir" and it tells me there are 31 files, and 12 directories and 16,000 MB free (which is exactly what it should be)
It also says that the following files are missing or curupted:
c:\windows\himem.sys
c:\windows\dblbuff.sys
c:\windows\ifshlp.sys
c:\win.com
I think it is looking for an older versaion or windows, so I got my son's (extremely slow PC) and copied them to a floppy.
Then copy them to C:\windows to see if it will make the machine happy, but nope.
Tried safe mode, and every option listed. It won't even scanreg.
How can I get it to reinstall PX pro or fix it so I can get to my data? I have a new HD, I was going to install, so really I just want to be able to access my files. I can't find my XP home disk, but i have win 98 and XP pro upgrade.

 

[Snakeyeskm]

Try this since you have a new HD.
1)disconnect your old drive (power connector should do it)
2)Install the new drive (as master)
3)Install WinXP Pro on the new drive.
4)Once WinXp is running fine connect the old drive as slave to your master. (adjust any bios boot settings if necessary)
5)Reboot and you should be able to access the data on your old drive.
Cheers


Zero Mistakes = Zero Experience
And Boy do I have experience !

 

[Ram0135]

I had a similar problem with an older compaq that I had. If you have a windows 300 disk or the win xp home disk you can run a "full" install of XP. When you put the disk in and reboot into it, it will run normally and then it will say it could not find the previous version of windows, pop that CD in and it verifies and away you go. The files you listed are installed as the first main components so this should work.

-Ram0135

 

[ATST]

Thanks for your replies. Afraid to do too much to it and risk losing data, I ended up setting up my new 60 gig drive and slaved the 30 gig one (described in first post) in an attempt to retrieve files. The new set up will detect the drive, but it says there is nothing there, and asks if I want to format it. The new drive has both win 98 (FAT32) and XP pro (NTFS) on it, and I had tried to read the old drive using each one, with the same results. The old drive is still FAT32.
Belarc Advisor tells me it is 16 gigs free (which would be correct) If I boot the drive to DOS and enter <dir> it also tells me there are 31 folders and 12 files, and has 16 gigs free. So I know the data is there. Now I just want to get to it.

 

[Snakeyeskm]

IF you can see the files in DOS try copying them them to your new drive using DOS Copy commands. It should work.
Cheers

Zero Mistakes = Zero Experience
And Boy do I have experience !

 

[ATST]

I thought of that, but I am not really sure how to do it.
I am dumber than I may appear.

 

[Snakeyeskm]

You are smart because you ask. Its been a while since I used DOS but here goes.
In DOS
Type
Dir/p
to get a pape by page listing of files

Type
CD/?
to get attributes that will allow you to move from one directory to another

Type
copy/?
to get a listing of copy attributes for copying files from one directory to another
(XCOPY command will copy entire directories)

For example
Copy d:\example.txt c:would copy a text file called Example from your D drive To your D drive.

SAy your old drive is Directory D
and say xxxy.txt is a file in that directory that you want to recover to your new drive C
Type
Copy D:\xxxy.txt C:
I would suggest you create a new folder in you new drive and name it OLDAT

Then you could type

Copy D:\xxxy.txt C:\OLDAT
and the file xxxy.txt should appear int the OLDAT folder on your C drive

Best of luck




Zero Mistakes = Zero Experience
And Boy do I have experience !