On 29/07/2010 14:36, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

Home. Thanks for the tips -

Ignore the blogs reference, don't think there's much in the way of tips
there...

I'll try them. What annoys me is the XP
installation CD says it has a repair function but gives no clue.


That's not really the 'repair function'. Pressing R at that moment dumps
you into the CLI bases recovery console, and you are expected to have
swallowed half a ton of Microsoft documentation and training to know how
to waddle around in there - or follow hints from web pages.

What you need is a bit further along in the Windows Setup thing that
starts from the CDROM, which offers to repair a selected partition the
tool shows you. However not all install CD's will have this option - and
it would be very dangerous to proceed if this were a live machine with
no backup.

Heed warnings on
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

That was my "senior moment" a couple of weeks ago. Totally wreaked a
good machine install, whilst in the process of trying to capture it for
a virtualisation project :-(

--
Adrian C