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I am moving a drive from a customer's old computer to his new one. He wants to be able to boot the new computer using the old drive because there is a legacy program installed which is not compatible with later versions of Windows (according to the customer). The new computer originally ran Windows Vista but is now running Windows 10, and the old computer ran Windows XP.

I moved the old drive to the new computer and tried booting from it, but it failed. I cannot test the drive on the old computer because it cannot even power on anymore. But, from the customer told me, he has always been able to boot Windows XP from the drive in the past (before the computer failed).

In order to inspect the drive, I purchased a USB-C adapter on Amazon and loaded it on my own computer. Very interestingly, there only seems to be one partition on the drive. The system partition is present, but the boot partition is missing:

Disk Management Screenshot

This is the file system in that single partition: File System Screenshot

I don't know too much about operating systems or how bootable media works, but judging from the partition(1) and partition(2) in the boot.ini file, I'm pretty sure sure there's supposed to be two partitions on this disk:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

I also observed that in the other versions of Windows I have used (Windows 7, 8.1, and 10), there are always at least two partitions.

So why is there no boot partition on this Windows XP drive?

Cardinal System
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2 Answers2

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XP will not run natively (that is, boot and run) on a new and modern system. It is too old in terms of technology.

Run it as a Virtual Machine instead. I do that and have a working XP machine here.

Make sure the machine supports hardware virtualization. Check in BIOS to see if it is present and just not enabled.

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I can't fully answer all of that and there's some funny terminology about difference between system partition and bootable partition.

I think maybe when windows describing a partition as bootable, it can mean that it's the partition with a Windows that the computer goes into. So, maybe, the one that is pointed to in the boot menu.

But if a partition is active, then it is to be booted from. from the point of view of where the BIOS goes to.

With Windows XP, an active partition would have a \boot.ini file, and you found that it has that.

I'm not sure why it has no Windows directory, and why it has a WinNT directory. My recollections of Windows XP, (which I used from 2002 or 2003 to 2011), are that it had \Windows as i'm sure I frequently went to \windows\system32, and I don't quite recall a \WinNT. For it to be lacking a \Windows directory seems strange to me. I think it might be possible to install Windows to a directory of a different name. It'd be interesting to see what's inside the \WinNT directory. This link here https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/should-the-folder-cwinnt-be-present-on-all/e376a2a8-19cc-40d0-a63c-081b107798d1 suggests maybe Win2K had that, so maybe if XP was upgradede from 2K. Maybe you'd see \WinNT\system32.

Once Win7 came out, then I started seeing a 100MB partition. And people started talking about GPT and EFI.. Back in the days of XP.. we didn't really see that or hear much or anything about GPT, and EFI. In the days of XP it was simpler. An active partition was typically the one you booted Windwos off of. the Active partition was the one with the boot menu, and from there it could boot from another partition.

So Windows 10 or 11 or 7 didn't identify the Windows XP partition as a boot partition, I wouldn't conclude much from that.. It might be that it only sees one partition as a boot partition and that's your boot partition and not ever going to be anything connected via USB.

It was the norm with XP to have just one partition. If anybody added another partition that was either to install another OS as a backup OS. Or, to make a data partition.

I agree with you that the boot.ini file is showing that there are at least were, two partitions on there.

You could say "ok, forget about it being bootable just try to get their data for them".

Or, you could plug the hard drive into a computer such that that hard drive is the only hard drive in there. Try to start it up. If it fails then see what error it gives. Try booting up a Win XP installation CD or Win XP installation USB, and go to a "recovery console", and run bootcfg /rebuild which will look for Windows XPs on there, it will find just one. And it might be able to make an adjustment to make it bootable. FIXMBR is another command from the recovery console, and FIXBOOT. These are things that can help make an installation boot up. Those three commands were basically the three amigos with getting a windows installation booting when it wasn't.

barlop
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