Pat said:
Can I reinstall the OS (wanted to
go back to 2K Pro)
A man with a brain!
onto the existing 6.0 GB simple volume
on this dynamic disk? Do I need to revert the disk to
basic?
Interesting, I thought you needed at least one "basic" disk in order to
boot up the PC, and that dynamic disks were only for data? If this is
not the case I've obviously failed to understand basic/dynamic disks.
The way it usually works with NT/2000/(XP?) is that you have a "system"
disk (in MS speak) which contains the boot code that the computer uses
when the BIOS hand over control. This disk has NTLDR, NTDETECT and BOOT.INI
Once these files have loaded, you can start up nearly any other
operating system on any other disk or partition by using the menu in
BOOT.INI (these disks are called "boot" disks in MS speak, but whether
anyone knows why is hard to say).
In theory you can run Winnt32.exe from within Windows and tell it
install the target O/S (with included service packs) to the disk and
partition you choose (without disrupting your existing O/S), however XP
appears to not allow this. I can't see any technical reason for this,
but Bruce Chambers in an earlier thread claims there is. Basically
Winnt32 starts a copy process from a source folder and the rest of setup
does not run until the machine is rebooted and the O/S loader starts the
new O/S.
