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Boot problem - I am dumb
I came home from being on the road all week to be greeted by my wife saying that our 5 year old "broke" the computer. We're running XP Home on an old Dell Dimension that originally had a 13 gb hard drive, but to which I recently added an 80 gb drive. Windows (and programs) were (are) on the old drive (C) and documents are on drive D. On boot, the computer was saying non-system disk - I checked the removable drives for leftover PB&J sandwiches but found nothing amiss. I went into BIOS settings, and tried changing the boot order, and thought everything was right, but still got the same message. I thought the drive (5-6 years old) had finally died. I put the Windows XP CD in, set the computer to boot from CD, ran setup, and then chose repair. It asked me for an administrator password, which I could not come up with, even though it has only been a few months since the XP upgrade. I tried every password I have ever used and nothing worked. I went back and my only choice was to install XP. It did, and because of space, I had to install it on the newer drive. After install, it booted up great to this install version, with nothing that looked familiar - no settings or anything (I understand the reason for this by the way). Still depressing to think I would have to recreate everything. Then, on a whim, I went back into computer setup and changed the boot order again, and poof, everything is okay. Just like the good old days.
After all of that, here is my question - it seems that now I have the operating system installed on both drives - is this okay? I bolted on the activation screen, but what will happen if I try to activate Windows again on the new drive install? Should I leave both installs in case the old hard drive does go kablooey - I can set it to boot from newer drive? If I can get rid of the new install, how do I do this? I apologize for the length and rambling nature of this, I really am tired..... Thanks in advance for any help.
Ben
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Linear Mode
