Whew!
I almost did a really dumb thing today. On my current PC, I had originally installed Windows XP on the C-drive when it came out a few years back. After a while, when things got slow and unreliable, I installed it again on the G-drive and moved everything there. That was perhaps two years ago.
I had cleaned all of the old data off of the C-drive installation and was ready to reformat that drive and wipe it clean. When I did so, however, I could no longer boot to the G-drive.
GULP!
I had saved the BOOT.INI file from the root of the C-drive, where it had been stored, but Windows would not read it to load the G-drive installation. All of my data was there, but I couldn't get at it from the Windows environment. I had good backups and all, so if I did lose everything, I wouldn't really have lost much more than time to restore.
But fortunately, reinstalling Windows XP on the C-drive with that BOOT.INI file there allowed the system to see both installations, so everything was still alive and well. Whew!
I learned that my current installation of Windows must be getting old and cranky again, however, as a site my son has been trying unsuccessfully to use (Planet HotWheels) works just fine under the clean, new installation. But that should get taken care of when I get the new system built and running. I'll be moving most everything to it and keeping the current system networked into it as a test platform and for my kids to use.
So, words to the wise. Keep good backups. You never know when you might need them.
10:20:17 PM 
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