system/boot partitions

If you cant be bothered to read all of the following, the jist can be summed up in the last 3 paragraphs. thanks


i had xp home oem edition on 1 partition, had a second partition for some files and installed xp pro trial on 3rd partition. the installation, for whatever reason changed my home partition to extended/logical with the 2nd partition(for files) as the system partition. i ran norton ghost to save my xp home partition just in case and removed xp pro. everything worked but xp home was still a logical partition.

I tried to reinstall xp pro which now leaves my xp home unbootable. I have tried fixboot/fixmbr from recovery console but i get "missing HAL.DLL". i have replaced the file (which was there) with a new hal.dll as i assumed the original was corrupt. still same error.

so i replaced the partition with the ghost backup which now uses the xp pro partition as the system partition, home logical partition as the boot partition and my file partition has got lost somewhere during all of this (i had a backup. no worries).

So now i can boot into xp home but my settings have changed and i get multiple errors after login. the OS works but its just a bit screwed up.


So, files and settings transfer wizard + reinstall? i no longer have the install discs for many of my essential applications so a simple reinstall is out of the question.

Or delete xp pro installation and run an over the top installation of xp home so it becomes both boot and system partition as it used to be? its an oem version but i have an oem cd. can i do an over the top install with oem?



thank you for help