Copy windows xp back to main drive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter martos
  • Start date Start date
M

martos

I've just moved to XP after years with 98. I backed up my
win 98 just by copying all the files. This works fine for
me, sending them to cd and then pasting them back to the
drive is the way I do it. So I installed XP and after a
couple of days everything of downloading drivers etc it
worked okay. But I needed to go back to my win 98 version
on last time, so I copied every file from XP, including
hidden files, to an external hard drive. Formatted and
loaded win98, did what I needed to. Formatted the drive
and copied the XP installation back to the drive. And
guess what, when I try to boot from this drive I get an
error. So it would seem this is not possible in XP as it
was in 98. i DO NOT want to reinstall xp and all the
drivers. I have all the settings there on the copy. How
do I make this installation active?
 
Hi, Martos.

The key is the "boot sector". This is the first physical sector in each
partition; it's only 512 bytes, but they are critical code that starts
loading the operating system. The MS-DOS/Win9x/ME-style boot sector tells
the computer to find and load the DOS "system files", io.sys and msdos.sys.
The WinNT-style boot sector looks for the NT system file ntldr, which uses
boot.ini and ntdetect.com to find and load the rest of WinXP.

The boot sector is not a file. Therefore, all the file copying back and
forth didn't affect the boot sector, but each time you reformatted, it got
wiped out again. To get the correct version of the boot sector back in
place, you need to boot from the WinXP CD-ROM and choose to Repair WinXP
using the Recovery Console's FixBoot command.

Depending on what tools you used to do the file copying, you also may be
missing the critical files that make up the Registry. If you still have
problems after restoring the boot sector, post back and let us know where
you stand and we may be able to help you with the next phase.

RC
 
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