Dual boot questions

A guy brought me his PC; it's a dual boot with Win2000 and WinXP Pro. The Win2000 crashes to a corrupt or missing system32\config error. The WinXP Pro runs fine. Here's the questions: can I reload Win2000 'over the top' of itself safely without messing up WinXP and without losing any Win2000 docs, programs, data, etc? How can I access the 'My Documents' for Win2000 from within XP? I looked around (briefly) and couldn't seem to find the Win2000 My Documents folder. Does it get moved or renamed in a dual boot setup? I guess what the guy did was he saw that Win2000 was crashing, so he installed WinXP Pro thinking it would upgrade and repair the Win2000. It obviously didn't.... so, any help or suggestions will be appreciated.
Thanx!

hd2k

 

Sounds as though the Windows 2000 documents were lost when he reinstalled XP but the Windows 2000 files stayed allowing a dual boot.

You should just be able to install 2000 again, but via booting from the 2000 cd. It should then just install it "next" to XP, unless there's different partitions in which case I'd use that.

 

I have a dual-boot system with Win 98SE and Win XP, but I haven't worked with Win 2K in this way, so I can't give an expert answer to your questions.

But, I believe you should try a Repair installation of Win 2K, not a full restore which would format C and reinstall Win 2K. Again, I'm not very familiar with Win 2K; can someone confirm that the Repair option is available in it, as it is with Win XP? Why the Repair procedure? To avoid deleting everything, including the Win 2K My Documents folder, which may still be intact.

If you can do a Repair of Win 2K and regain access to My Documents, I believe you may still have some work to do to get the dual-boot configuration working right. In others, he should see a screen during startup which allows him to choose which OS to boot from.

Normally, to set up a dual-boot configuration, with two versions of Windows, the older version must be installed first. In this case, since you're going to be doing a reinstall or repair of the older OS, I'm wondering whether that will make the multi-boot screen not work right. If so, I'm sure it can be fixed. I'm just pointing this out so that know what may happen.

 

The boot.ini file does give the option of booting to Win2k or WinXP. If I choose 2k, the PC crashes (missing or corrupt file c:\winnt\system32\config\software). If I choose XP, it boots perfect. The main thing is to recover the documents from the Win2k installation. Maybe I didn't make it clear in the first post. It doesn't matter if the Win2k is fixed or not, just as long as we can recover My Documents from the Win2k install. I'd actually like to remove the Win2k installation after the docs are saved if possible. Unfortunately, both OS'es are on the same partition "next to each other" versus being on seperate, individual partitons (which would make life LOTS easier). So, how do I access the Win2000 "My Documents" folder? Can I get to it from within XP?
Anyway, thanx for the info & tips above, and thanx for any future suggestions.

hd2k

 

Well, installing both OS on the same partition is a bad way to go about it, as you know, I'm sure. If Win XP uses the same default path for My Documents as Win 2K, then the installation of XP would have overwrote the Win 2K folder, right?

Can he recall the name(s) of specific files so that you can try a search for them? Or, if he used Word, for example, search for all .doc files.

 

I just talked to him on the phone and he told me exactly what files were the most important. So I searched 'em out and luckily they weren't even in the Win2000 My Documents folder like he had told me they were. It turns out that he had created a custom folder on C: and put all the files there (over 25gb worth!). So, the problem is more or less solved. Maybe I'll start a new thread about the removal of Win2000. Or maybe I'll just leave it but I'll modify the boot.ini so it no longer offers Win2000 as an option and will therefore boot directly to XP.... Anyway, thanx to everybody for your thoughts and suggestions....

hd2k