I'm trying to figure out how to explain this without it taking ten pages. My PC has two hard drives, C: and D: C: is 20Gb. when it looked like filling up under the combined weight of music and secret men's business I bought an 80Gb to replace it, but I decided it would be easier to leave the original as C: and install D as a backup drive, transferring all the space-consuming files to D.
For some reason, no doubt due to my own ignorance, Windows appears on both drives, and the boot sequence is an odd mixture of files from C and D. Similarly, Program Files when downloaded tend to be downloaded to D, but not exclusively.
I suspect this is the cause of some if not all of my networking problems, and would like to start again. BUT. If I format and lose files yet again, Mrs B will hire somebody to kill me. No matter what lengths I go to to back everything up before I format there is always something, usually to do with emails in some form, which is missing when I proudly present the newly formatted, clean computer for her pleasure.
So (hey, I'm getting there as quickly as I can) I thought perhaps if I disconnected D, booted from C and tried to see if everything she needs is there, I could then copy everything from C on to D, format C and reinstall Windows (XP Pro). From there, reinstall programs on to C, copy files from D on to C temporarily, format D and put files only back on to it, no Windows. Heaps of storage space, normal boot sequence restored on C; Robert's your mum's brother. Wrong.
If I disconnect D, Windows won't reboot. Disconnect C and the same result. Hmmm.
I've made a system restore tonight and told it to boot from the original Boot Ini file, but nothing appears to have changed. Presumably if I had an external hard drive, I could just copy everything on to it and play to my heart's content with C and D, but I don't, and the only one I have access to uses firewire, which I don't have on the PC (900 Celeron).
I tried to get a screen dump of the MSConfig setup and Boot Ini files etc to post on here, but I don't know how.
I know I haven't really asked a question here but does anybody know the answer, apart from buying an external HDD?
Thinks; this will test them. 