Getting rid of Dual OS???

[Martoch]

I'm doing a system cleanup for a friend because it is so damn slow...what I found first was that she had dual OS's installed without even knowing it. She has M.E. (C drive) and XP (D drive) Pro loaded and the computer is sluggish as can be. What would be the best way to rid the system of M.E.? I've never run across this before, she didn't know anything about formatting/clean installing and she doesn't want me to do it now.

I've already done a ton of XP Tweaks, run adaware/spybot, etc...

Compaq Presario 5000

Athlon T-bird 1GHz
128MB PC-133 (I'm going to triple this for free! )

Thanks guys!
Mike

[John Prophet]

Does she have any files that need saving on C:? I think first Id just unhook the drive and see what happened....see if xp still boots fine etc....Im not sure though about the mbr as to how it will be affected. Possibly it might change the drive letter of the d: to c: and then the boot.ini wont be looking for the right drive to boot off of...so youd have to boot off of the cd and go to the recovery console and edit the boot.ini file. (Ive never done it before, maybe you just have to do fixmbr)

[bailey]

this is going to be diffcult, as you know compacq uses the c drive for the bios information, and me was the default installationwhat I would do is use partition magic to remove the primary partition which has me on it, and resize the d partition and rename it c.
then use the xpcd to do a repaire install of xp, that should fix the boot sequenct too.
this is ofcourse it its xp that you want for the only system on it.

[John Prophet]

I dont think all compaqs use the bios on c: drive thingy.

[R1ohsorry]

ok is it on two seperate ahrdrives? or are they just partitions, because you can use the xp disk to delete the ME partition
Bios is just backed up on a comaq on the c drive its not actually stored there

[excuzzzeme]

Sometimes Compaq and Gateway hold the original load on drive D: (Single HDD/2part.)so when you drop in the restore disk it can reload from there thereby creating a faster recovery. If You have 2 individual drives I would reccommend a complete wipe and reload. To get around that method you will need to modify the boot.ini in XP to boot only XP and then from the registry try to delete ME. This method is neither efficient nor a sure thing. You don't want to reformat C: as you might wipe the MBR. Since you "perfromed a bunch of tweaks...." I think your customers best interest is to back up files that are to be saved then wipe both drives and do a clean install.

[Martoch]

Sorry for the delay here, but I convinced her to let me install XP Pro on her system next week when she gets back from her trip.
Bye Bye M.E.!!!



Thanks for your help though, it did not go unnoticed...


FYI: It was 1 drive, 2 partitions.

[excuzzzeme]

BTW- Circuit City, Comp/USA, Staples, etc like to upgrade customer systems without ever removing the original OS. Can't count the number of times I have seen your description of this problem (almost weekly) reocurring thanks to them. When this happens, I write a detailed bill explainig that the Upgrade was not performed properly and send the the customer back to the store that originally did it in hopes of a refund (even if it's a partial). Gues that's why my customer base is growing............