Customer was out of disk space on D: drive. Sounded easy enough.. until discovering system has XP installed on 1.8GB D: drive. Apparently, this Compaq shipped with Windows 98 on it's C: drive and just happened to have an extra partition that, for some reason, has received the blessing of an operating system.

Warning ! Partition Magic failed to solve the problem - it shrunk the C: drive to help make more room for D:, but Windows XP got very angry when I tried to move it's partition borders.

After much enlightenment, problem solved by a few tricks:

• Image XP partition to file in free space on C:
• delete and recreate partition with last half of drive
• restore image to new partition
• modify boot.ini to resemble the following:

[boot loader]
timeout=3
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
C:\="Microsoft Windows" 

Somewhere along the way a Windows XP repair ran successfully. Later, the same repair couldn't find the WinXP installation.

good luck !

 

 

( Windows XP Professional Pro Presario )