Using Recovery Console to boot up

Guys, I need help with something I think is probably pretty straightforward.

My brother's PC had two partitions on it, C and D. We put a new XP installation into D, then decided to delete C with Partition Magic and rename D to C.

I'm pretty damn sure that I told the app to make the remaining partition the *active* partition, but stone me if when we tried to boot up the PC we got "disc boot error - boot from CD".

Anyway I'm stuck now. I'm trying to fix the mess by booting with the Windows XP CD and using the recovery console, but I'm not used to using those DOS commands and even though I've tried *FIXBOOT C:* and *BOOTCFG* I'm getting nowhere.

Help please!!

 

I will suggest since you have XP-cd, to reformat again,and this time do the right thing(XP-on C: partition).

 

That don't make the homeboys happy sarmajor sir! rolleyes

My big brother's got a shitload of apps and data he don't wanna roll over, (and I certainly don't wanna go through all the tedium of reinstalling them!)

Anyway here's the state of play. We're booting up XP from a floppy disk! :-D
Yessir, over here in little ole England, some of our comps still have them! :-D

I got it from here and I'm glad as hell I did 'cos otherwise I'd still be really stuck.

Anyway now we've got our 2 partitions C and D. Our OS (booting from the floppy!!) is in D, (which we want to rename C and have it boot from the HD). And our C (which we want to rename D) is gonna be our store for My Documents, downloads, etc, etc. (That's nice and clear right? rolleyes)

We still need your help my friends, 'cos we're not real geeks, just campfollowers! :-D

 

The problem is that when you installed the second version of Windows on D: it permanently set itself to look for all its boot instructions on D:

You can't just change the letter of your OS partition. It won't work. If you've already loaded a bunch of apps and don't want to reload Windows then your only choice is to change the drive letter back to D: and use C: for storage.

 

Okie doke!

But how about getting the PC to boot up from the HD? Right now it will only boot up from the floppy.:confused

 

I would hope if you use partition magic to change the drive letter back to D: it would load without the floppy.

Do you have a partition magic CD?

 

OK, the OS partition is labelled as D:\ now, and with the floppy in the drive boots up fine, but without the floppy we get

NTLDR is missing
Press Ctr+Alt+Del to restart

Is there a quick fix? :confused

 

I assume partition magic was only installed on the one partition that you deleted. Were you also running boot magic with it?
When I wanted to remove a partition, I installed partition magic and boot magic to the partition that I wanted to keep before i removed the old partition.
If you can create a boot magic floppy, you may be able to fix the problem. it has been a few years and I no longer use partition magic so I can't offer more help as to actual menu choices.
These are the notes I had on removing Boot Magic: isable the boot manager then go to control panel and add/remove it. Reboot and search for BTMAGIC.PQ and delete it.

Maybe if you search for it, it is still on the computer and it is preventing you from booting up what used to be D:\.