Wierd and tricky XP problem

[NickM]

While trying to install a demo last week I had a nasty problem happen to me. The machine basically fell over and died - not even task manager would open. I mucked around for a while and eventually ended up trying to repair windows. Not much luck there and reinstalling didn't work so I went and bought a new HDD thinking that might fix the problem. I bought new RAM as well at the same time as I'd been meaning to buy another gig of ram and a new HDD for a while.

New RAM and HDD went in and I formatted the new HDD and installed windows onto it. At that point I realised one serious issue - I had been trying to repair a SP2 Windows system by reinstalling with an SP1 disc (doh!). My new HDD was 320gig but of course I could only get a 130gig partition using my windows disc.

I went on and reinstalled windows, wacked on SP2 and downloaded security updates etc. Today I decided to stop trying to repair the old install and just go with my new one. I left the 130gig partition on the new drive (E: ) and formatted the rest of it in a separate partition (F: ). Intending E: to be the system partition, and F: for program files etc, I tried to format the old 200 gig HDD (C: ) to use for data/files and noticed in Disc Manager that while E: was apparently what I was booting from, C: was the system. Obviously my attempt to format it failed.

I went into the BIOS and swapped the boot order of the drives around, noticing that the older 200gig drive was first in the queue. When I put the new 320gig drive (E: & F: ) first, I got a NTLDR is missing error. I can see from other threads on this board how to fix that, but I'm concerned that this will result in me losing material that has reinstalled onto the C: drive. When I boot up I also get an option of 2 different systems. I always choose the top one. The bottom one used to result in me getting the corrupt file messages that I as getting before I put in the new HDD, but now I just get a blank screen.

I'm not sure why C: is still the system and to be honest I'm not sure it actually is. My documents etc are on the E: drive (if I go into My Documents through the explorer and make a new folder it shows up on E: ).

So far I've lost no data or anything and now the machine basically works but I want to sort this out.

Any advice?