2 XP installs, one corrupt

[Early Q]

I thought it was time for a reinstall of XP (professional), so I preceeded with the upgrade option from the autorun... it reboots, starts 'Preparing Install', at the end of that it quits setup with a message along the lines of : "Could not gather required information. This is an internal error. Contact your administrator".

Anyway it does this all the time, I tried repair, booting from the CD etc to no avail. The only way out I found was to choose new install, but I didn't want it to overwrite my previous XP install because I only have outdated backups ... so I installed it into a new directory (C:\WIN\)...

Now I've got a corrupt OS in the /WINDOWS folder, and a working one but seems to ignore all the programs on the HD.

Quite a pickle. What I'd ideally like to do is remove the two installs and have a working one installed onto the /WINDOWS folder.

Not really sure how to do this... should I just delete the /WINDOWS folder, run a reg cleanup. Then do a new install into it, and delete the /WIN folder? Argh

Windows woes

Thanks for any help

[Early Q]

Well I've decided to backup and reformat as its too much hassle... every program and setting is missing its registry entries meaning I'd need to reinstall all of them... I may as well wipe the HD .

[bailey]

you cannot do a upgrade of xp on top of xp, also you were not logged in as the adminstrator, thats why you got that error.
also there is no need to reinstall xp eather as it is a very good O/S and is able to do its own repaires, it can also restore back to any previous date you want, so doing a reinstall will be a waste of time.