heres what i can tell you jonsushi. The hard drive you originally had have been paritioned as it should have. Typically when installing an operating system you place it on a FAT partition, this way anything else you load onto your computer is placed onto the NTFS. This way when a probablem is brought up with your OS which seems to have happened you can simply reformat that FAT partition and reinstall the OS. However it seems as though since your FAT partition was not completely blank the OS still remained at less impart on your hard drive. You should have reformatted the FAT partition and then installed the OS. The data you had existing on the hard drive therefore whould not have been lost. It shows like you were able to score a free hard drive from Dell and for that i commend you. Yuo have done well. Your only possible problem with installed XP is it is on a single partition and you could lose your other data if you need to reinstall XP again (a very likely occurence). Also wether the partition is FAT or NTFS matters, but i don't completely understand the difference. I am by far not a computer god but that is the two sence i believe i know.
I've got a new Dell PC. I wanted to do a fresh install of Windows XP, mostly because I didn't want everything that Dell puts on their PCs. So, I inserted the "Reinstallation CD", from Dell, into my CD drive, and booted from it. It did its setup thing and I got thru to the part where I'm asked whether I want to reinstall XP or repair. I did the reinstall option, and then I get to the screen that asks what partition I want to use. It listed 3 existing or blank partitions:
-:Partition1[FAT] 71MB(63MB free)
C:Partition2[NTFS] 149409MB(144078MB free)
F:Partition3[FAT32] 3106MB(275MB free)
So, I picked Partition 2, and went thru and completed the installation fine. Well, due to some noise issues, Dell sent me a blank hard drive. So, I go thru the same process, using the same CD. However, when I get to the screen where it lists the partitions, there is only one partition listed. Obviously, I picked that one as the partition to install XP onto. As far as I know everything went thru fine. XP got up and running. Its only been a day since I did it, but everythings been working as far as I can tell.
My question is Why did the first hard drive list 3 partitions when the second blank hard drive listed just one? Is what I did fine?

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