[keyz]

In a rush, I had a local shop put together a new PC for me while I made a quick trip out of town.

Long story short, they had to reinstall the OS (xp home), and the result was that they left the original C drive partition in place and created the reinstall in a new D partition. My intent was to eliminate the C partition by temporarily renaming it to X, then renaming D to C, and first attempted to do so with Partition Magic, but encountered a message that I would subsequently be unable to boot. The local techs said to use “Disk Management” to accomplish the switch, but I basically got the same message, so they then said to just go ahead and delete the C partition.

That concerns me. Both C and D appear as “local” drives, with D tagged as the boot drive, but C is tagged as the “system” drive. Partition Magic on the other hand tags C as the “primary” partition with a status of “active”, and D as only a “logical” partition with a status of “None”…

Lastly, FYI, on booting up, I encounter a message asking which of two XP Home OS’s to inititate.

Any suggestions on how to safely resolve this?

 

[Alex Ethridge]

I take it you want a single partition that consists of the entire available space.

If you do not want to save anything on your drive(s), you can delete all partitions in one operation with a utility like delpart or zapart, both freeware.

Send me an e-mail with zapart as the subject. Put nothing else into the subject line and be sure there are no leading spaces. You will receive zapart back from my autoresponder, usually within a half hour. Put it on a boot disk, any boot disk, reboot and use the instructions that came with the e-mail.

After deleting the partitions, place your XP setup disk into the CD-ROM drive, be sure you are configured to boot from the CD-ROM drive and boot again.