Stang,
Per your request, I'm keeping you posted on my misadventures in attempting to move my settings from partition 4 to partition 1 in Windows XP. In short nothing worked well enough, and I've decide to live with it. I could have re-installed the os by now, so what's the point? That's the whole point of the os images anyway.
I tried the file and setting transfer wizard. It was an udder (are you reading tc? :-) failure. Not even the Outlook Express messages or settings survived. So I tried to copy folders. Well windows won't let you copy system files in use, or overwrite files in use, so whichever partition I booted from I was out of luck, because either the source or destination had files in use. So I tried to copy in dos. The long file names and the complex directory structure foiled me, though I almost got things working well enough this way. Only Microsoft Office wouldn't cooperate. I have lots of settings in Office I didn't want to remember how to reset.
An interesting dos aside. I made a system disk using XP. It turns out the dos command interpreter on this disk is not the same version as the one you can access on the hard drive installed by Windows XP. This was very inconvenient, because very few dos commands are available from the system disk, and the ones on the hard drive don't work with the old dos I'd booted with from the xp system disk. Attempting to copy hidden files was basically impossible with no attrib command or copy switches available.
So that's the report, and in the end things turned out ok. There are advantages to having docs and settings on a separate partition. When I remember any of them, I'll let you know. ;-)
Esteban |
