AAAAAAAAHHHHHH
i cant believe what ive done
i have a 60gb hdd split into 3 partitions , c drive i had ME installed then recently i installed XP onto d drive as a dual boot set up , i got XP set up nicely and was happy with the way things were so i decided to restore ME to a ghost back up i did 2 months ago , and lo and behold i cant boot into XP as ive written over the boot area on c drive that allowed me to dual boot, and when i did the back up of ME 2 months ago , ME was the only os i had installed at the time .

How can i rectify this , i tried reinstalling XP but when its about to start installing it says all the data , files folders settings on the d drive will be overwritten .

How can i get back to dual boot without overwritting my current xp installation ??

Is it possible ?
I backed up XP with ghost today before this happened so if anything goes wrong i can start again , so i can afford to take any risks if necessary .

Please help im really p~~~ed off at myself .

If you've got all the data on the drives you may just need a new boot.ini file on the c drive.

You can either do this by hand or xp has a rescue option - what happens if you run setup.exe from the xp and choose recovery or something rather than install.

Your best bet is to completely reformat.

Then install ME and then XP. All your files will be over written on your HD but you have backups so you can copy them back onto your hard drive.


Roger

i tried the recovery console and the fixboot command but no joy .

what about installing a "mini xp" o/s on drive e: temporarily (or somewhere with no data on).

This should rebuild the boot sector files etc on c: and aloow you to dual boot between me and this new xp. When this is working you can edit boot.ini to point to your proper xp installation.

Woooooohooooooooo!!!

THanks for help guys .
Heres what i done , i think this is what roger moore was meaning .
I installed xp again so losing my settings etc , but this then restored my dual boot and a frewsh install of xp on drive d , i then formatted d drive then backed up from my ghost back up i created earlier today , rebooted and im back to where i want to be .
I now have my dual boot restored and my xp OS back to exactly how it was .
I also have my ME OS the way i want it so i will now ghost c drive to back up ME and include the dual boot for XP .

Cheerz guys .

I'm glad its all working ok now.


Roger

Suggest you back up the following files from c:\
boot.ini
ntldr
ntdetect.com

Then if you need to restore me again you will be able to copy these back & boot XP again.

B.T.W. you could have extracted the second two from your XP install disk.
Boot.ini gets created however. Its not difficult to create one though.