New Motherboard, Old Hard Drive

Hello again, my old CPU died a few weeks ago and I recently bought a new Motherboard, PSU and CPU. After I installed those, I had to reinstall the operating system. I upgraded from Window XP Home Edition to Windows XP Professional Edition. I think that may have caused conflict because when the computer asked me to insert the OS disc i inserted the Pro Edition. I have a 180 Gig HDD and I guess I can't access my old files, I dont care about that it's just when I checked my availible Hard Drive space left, i have only 47% disc drive space availible left? Maybe two OSs are installed, or maybe my old files are there just inaccessible, can you guys help me please? Thanks in advance.

 

Not sure I follow you completely . . . but it sounds like your files are still there. A fresh install of XP Pro should be around 5 to 7gbs, which wouldn't explain why 53% of your disk is full.

Does your computer boot ok into XP Pro?

 

Well, no, I have to choose Windows XP Home Edition in order to boot it up, otherwise it says I'm missing a file i cant exactly remember, but I can figure out if you need me to. But heres the catch, when I run DXDIAG, i can see what my rig has, and it says I'm operating under Windows XP Professional.
Thanks for the help though.

 

Sounds to me that you can save a lot of agrivation by formatting the hard drive and starting from scratch.

 

If there are two XP installations on the same partition there could be conflict between the default directory names, making it confusing to locate files, but they are there and you should be able to access them by carefully analyzing each directory. There would be in this case two C:\Windows, C:\Documents and Settings, etc. I have used double installations to rescue files from a no boot system but I will name the second install drive CC, Z or something other than C to make it easier to locate along with a different user name. If the drive has corruption I would go for a third install to grab the files, then wipe the disk clean and start over with your preferred OS. Good luck!