Win XP Pro reinstall/activation issues - need expert advice

Question

Hi   I have a Dell 4550 Win XP Pro [refurbished, bought from dell outlet]. It came with a 30GB Hard drive (Drive 0, C:) and later I added a Maxtor 120GB as slave (Drive 1, F:). Both are Cable Select.   Yesterday I wanted to reinstall the OS. When I tried to boot the PC from the Dell Reinstall CD, it stopped with the message 'unknow hard error - ..\system32
tdll.dll'. Somehow I could get the reinstall work and successfully reinstalled the OS on the F: drive [Instead of booting from the CD, I autoran the CD after my PC was on and it worked]. Now I am left with two OS on both drives. I edited boot.ini and deleted the extra line so that the PC boots from the new OS on F: drive. But now how I do uninstall / remove / reformat the C: drive? I tried all the solutions found on these forums [(i) removed C: disk, made F: disk as master (drive 0), turned off drive 1 in boot setup and rebooted (ii) swapped both drives and rebooted etc] but none of them worked. It always needs C: drive as master (drive 0) to boot. I get a message 'error loading OS' if I make F: drive as master. Looks like, it always starts booting from C: drive and runs OS on F: drive. It can no longer run OS on C: drive. Is it something to do with Master boot record? Do I have to create a MBR on F: disk before removing the C: disk?   Another problem was with Win XP activation. During the reinstallation on F: drive, I entered the product key found on my PC. Finally it asked me to activate Win XP but when I tried to activate it, it was failing with that product key. Luckily, I have an old Dell 2350 and used its product key and it worked. What is the problem here? Why didn't it take my original product key? Was it because I installed the OS on the F: drive? How do I fix this issue?   Btw, what is the issue with my Reinstall CD? Is it defective? How do I fix its ntdll issue?   Thanks a lot in advance for the help KK-DAL-TX   PS: For convinience, I used the terms C: drive (30GB)  and F: drive (120GB). I know their letters are changed when switched from master to slave and vice versa.

osprey4 · Answer

Well, first of all, the letters do not change when swapping master slave. If you reinstall XP on a second drive, XP remembers that the first drive is still C and will assign the other drive the first letter after your optical drives. That's just an XP quirk.

I'm not sure you will be able to format C, but you can certainly erase all of the files on it. The proper approach would have been to remove the old C, install XP, then pop the old drive back in. If you're up for it, I'd start over.

Activation. There have been issues with activation on Dell systems, which you can read about here.

kkdaltx · Answer

Thanks for the response.

I already tried that option [removed C: drive, made F: as master, and tried to boot from CD] but my CD was giving the "hard error on ntdll.dll". If I boot from F: without C: drive, I get "error loading OS".

osprey4 · Answer

If you are getting that error (hard error on ntdll.dll), then the system is not booting from the CD. When you swap drives around, make sure you clear NVRAM.

Storage, Drives & Media

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