What the freak happened??

[kisk]

Ok, I installed a fresh copy of XP Pro onto a clean hard drive. Setup the system to have one user, Administrator, since I'm the only one using the computer and I'd like to have complete access to everything.

Anyway, I had a separate hard drive with XP installed on it too... my previous main drive that contained all my old data and I wanted to transfer over a few files, so after I got my new system setup and running good, I hooked the old drive up as the primary slave -- BIG MISTAKE! ... after I rebooted up, windows kept telling me it couldn't find my user profile and that it was either lost or corrupt. So it made me create a new profile.

This screwed me tremedously. Most of the stuff I spent 6 hours installing was under the 'Administator' user profile so everything was messed up. In Documents and Settings, 'Admistrator' is still there and all of the settings are still in there, but trying to move them to the new profile was kind of a waste of time since the the profile's registry files were all still missing.

Since this has happened, I just said to hell with the new system I spent so long setting up and its reformating now. I also bought a new 200gb WD HD so I can use it as a buffer to transfer over my files because I'll be dam**d if I go thru this again.

Anyway, I'm wondering if it was because I still had my "boot.ini" file in the old drive's root. Both boot.ini files on each disk where specifying the first partition. The old drive was setup about the same way, with 'Admistrator' as the only user.

What exactly did I do wrong? lol

Thanks!

[el_novato]

Did you set your new HDD to Primary Master? Also, it's recommended to connect the blue end of the IDE cable to the board, the Black to Primary and Gray to slave.

Hth

e.n.

[kisk]

I'm not sure what happened ... I had the new HD set as Primary Master, and the old HD set as Primary Slave ....

[pam123]

XP has a files and settings transfer wizard, you need the XP cd, that would have done the job for you.
Info here : http://www.windows-help.net/WindowsXP/howto-01.html