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Discussion Starter · #1 · (Edited)
Recently I had to reformat my 40GB hard drive. Before the reformat, I only had a C: Drive. Here is my problem step by step as best as I can remember it.

- I tried to reinstall Windows XP Home edition, and I received a message that I did not have enough space to install.
- I formatted C:, but it took a matter of like 2 seconds to reformat.
- In DOS mode, I rand FDISK to find out C: was only 7MB. I was informed I would need to partition the 40GB drive.
- I did so, finally ending up with drive 1 (I don't know what to label this as during this course of action, it showed no label.) with 40GB and drive C: with 32GB available.
- I formatted C: and installed Windows XP Home.
- Looking at My Computer, it showed I had an ANDERSON C: Drive (ANDERSON is the label I gave it) and a Local Disk D: Drive. When Windows installed, it installed to the D: drive. C: drive was completely empty.
- After upgrading to SP2, I rebooted. I got an error that said "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM."
- I booted into Repair Console mode but got lost in what to do, so I decided to just install Windows XP over again OVER the corrupted install.
- When the install was finished, I came to a screen asking me which OS I wanted to boot up. It showed me 3 options.

1. Windows XP (the one I had just installed)
2. 1 (Where this came from I have no idea, but it's corrupt the same as the first install)
3. Windows XP (the corrupted system file install)

- Upon booting up the freshest install, I found out that the newest install installed to C:. Now I have 1 XP on D:, one on C: and one OS labeled as "1" that only seems to exist upon booting up.

Drive C: is FAT32 (no clue how this happened or what FAT32 means)
Drive D: is NTFS (no clues how this happened or what NTFS means)

My questions are:

A) How do I revert my hard drive back to whatever the default is supposed to be, since I show 2 hard drives, I only want C:, and I want it to be the default, not only 7MB large. (Please provide step by step instructions for this, as I have no idea what to do. I know it has to do with FDISK and partitioning or something?

B) How do I remove the D: drive and the D: drive Windows XP Installation, so that when I boot up, it just boots into Windows XP from the C: drive by default instead of giving me different OS options?

C) Does anyone know where "1" came from?

D) (if applicable) If I can't undo this partition thing, then how do I remove the XP install on the D: drive.

Again, please provide step by step instructions as to what I need to do because when it comes to running the repair or recovery console, or dos mode, I have no clue what I am doing.

If I have to reformat again, I will. I don't mind as these installs are less than 24 hours old.

In case anyone needs the info, I have Compaq Presario S5000NX and I am using Windows XP Home (without SP2.)

Thanks in advance.

25,116 Posts
WOW my man thats an ordeal! :laugh:

I will give you an A+ for perseverence!

here is my recommendation to you;

download and run this free program to wipe/erase your entire hard drive it will be just as squeaky clean as the day it was new

then after nuking the drive; just pop in the Win XP CD (dont use fdisk) boot into the win xp cd and install the OS on one big NTFS drive with no extra partitions desired (the OS install should ask you "Do you want to use the maximum drive size available = YES)
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