How to fix HALF of a dual-boot system!?!?

[Wolfshanze]

I have a dual-boot system with a single partitioned hard drive.

WinME was installed first on the C-Drive while WinXP was installed second on the D-Drive... I'm not using any fancy boot managers, just the default Microsoft one when you install WinXP in-addition to WinME.

My problem is this...

WinME is F'd. It wouldn't boot to anything but safe-mode for awhile, and when I finally got it to boot to "normal" WinME, the entire OS was pretty messed-up (sytem devices was almost completely empty). The bootup to the ME-OS is really trashed, and while I did check to ensure the C-Drive is clean (there's no viruses or spyware and all my files are intact on the C-Drive), the OS itself is pretty dead. Oh, and WinME's auto-restore isn't working either.

Meanwhile, on my D-Drive, WinXP is running just fine with no problems... I can boot to it without any problems at all from the default Microsoft boot manager.

Here's my question:

Can I just reinstall WinME on the C-Drive without messing with the Microsoft boot-manager (and/or preventing me from getting to my WinXP installation)? If I reinstall WinME on the C-Drive, won't that overwrite the boot-block and prevent me from booting to WinXP on the D-Drive? How do I restore a working OS to the C-Drive without messing with my ability to boot to WinXP on the D-Drive?

Any advice on this?

 

[oynaz]

I cannot answer your question, but may I advice against WinME in the future? It has a tendency to self-destruct. If you need a Win9X OS, go for Win98 instead.

 

[drag]

When you install WinME it WILL destroy any bootloader on the system and replace it with it's own.

If you want to do it you need to make sure that you can boot up with your windows XP install cdrom and be able to enter recovery mode. Not all OEM disks can do this.

If you can do that then you can probably run the 'fixmbr' command to restore the Widnows XP NTLDR.
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/docu...ll/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx

 

[Wolfshanze]

Thanks for the tips guys!