Hi guys,

I acquired a virus this week, so I decided that instead of trying to fight against this virus, and remove whatever instances my antivirus program could find, I would just reinstall Windows.

So I formatted my spare hard drive (the one with Fedora on it) so I could back up all my data while I reinstalled Windows. Worked a treat, apart from the fact that for whatever reason, without requesting my permission, Windows has automatically used my spare hard drive as the System drive. So if I take that hard drive out, I can no longer boot up in to Windows.

This is <LOOK MA, I AM SWEARING>! There's nothing I can do about it. This happened before on my other computer (the computer for my family) and I had to reinstall Windows XP with the spare hard drive disconnected, then had to restart and connect the hard drive after installation had finished. I tried booting from the Windows XP CD and running FIXBOOT and FIXMBR commands, but this did nothing, so it's safe to assume that it will do nothing on this computer also... though you never know, it is Microsoft software after all.

Related articles:
Aaron's 'I hate Windows' thread
Am I being hacked?
Send To context menu...

Hmm, I always get to choose what drive/partition it is installed on when I install. Don't you get this?

Yes, I selected my 300GB hard drive. So it uses the 40GB hard drive as the System drive and then the 300GB for the data, without asking for my permission.

Also, since starting this thread, I have tried disconnecting the spare hard drive and booting in to Windows. It tells me that NTLDR is missing (this would be a good thing if I hadn't invested so much in a POS operating system), so I boot from the Windows XP CD. It picks up the fact that I do have a Windows XP installation on the 300GB drive, which it labels D:. So I go to the recovery console, select D: (Option 1), enter my Administrator password, then run FIXBOOT and FIXMBR. Then EXIT. Then it restarts, and goes to a screen saying that NTLDR is missing. So it's <LOOK MA, I AM SWEARING>. I have to stick with this very inconvenient double-disk setup until I reinstall Windows XP again with the spare hard drive disconnected. Can anybody suggest anything else?

Hmm, sorry, can't think of any other way. It's a reinstall, I'm afraid.

I'm backing up all my data again, and I'm going to reinstall Windows XP tonight.

Have fun with that! Or should I say good luck...

Hah!

Well, I reinstalled it (as you witnessed in the webcam conversation with me on MSN Messenger) and it's running great again now. I moved all the data from my spare hard drive back on to my main hard drive and I have installed Fedora Core 6 on to the spare hard drive again. I know it's not going to stay on here for long, but I can't stand using Windows XP for things like browsing the web, checking my bank balance.

I managed to get 400 blocked access attempts from ZoneAlarm within 30 minutes, which is an all-time high for me. Problem is, that's just the ones it detected, I'm sure that somebody could have gained access to my PC in that time.

I feel much safer using Linux at the moment.

Woah, that's a lot of hacks!