Let me straighten out any misconceptions. All of the current drives have only
been installed on this machine.

I had a faulty HD from which no data coiuld be retreived, (sent to a
recovery company), in the mean time I installed a SG 160GB and installed XP
and reloaded most of my programs. The damaged HD was under warrenty so
WD sent me a refurbished HD that was the same model and size of the old one.
I was intending to use the WD dirive strictly as backup for data, I didn't
want to loose all of my data again.

After about 3 weeks the SG 160GB XP installation started failing and I
couldn't get it to repair. I then installed XP on the refurbished WD drive
and reinstalled the HW and SW again.

In the meantime I investigated using a RAID configuration with a mirror
solution to try to avoid more down time, I depend on my computer everyday I
can't afford to have it unusable, it needs to be available 100% of the time.
So I came up with the brilliant idea of multiple boots.

My idea was to use the mirror drive as the main boot, and have one on each
of the other drives, just in case.

Most of my programs had been installed on the F: drive, of couse it was the
C: drive at the time. No fear I can use Norton Windoctor to change any
designations to whatever they need to be changed to. And no there has not
been a clean install on the F: drive. I read DL's responce and I will try to
repair the XP installation before I proceed any further.

I understand about having progams on a seperate partition or disk is not of
much value now. It seems to me that W95 would reinstall and any programs on
your HD would automatically be registered and installed for use. What a crime
that XP doesn't work that way.

Thank you both, DL and Ken. I'll let you know how I make out.
--
Thanks in advance,
Realtor John


"Ken Blake, MVP" wrote:

> RealtorJohn wrote:
>
> > I had a XP crash from which I couln't recover. I installed into my
> > home built 2 80 GB SG drives and set them up as a RAID 1. I still
> > have the drive with all of my programs that had been loaded onto it,
> > XP just doesn't work. I am using PnP to put all of my hardware back
> > into the new RAID 1 drive (E setup.
> > My set up is:
> > ASUS P4C800 Deluxe MB
> > 1GB RAM
> > Built in USB ports (4 are activated)
> > Built in Network connection (RJ45 Port)
> > Built in Sound using Sound MAx software.
> > Uses Promise Fst Trak 378 Driver for the RAID
> > I have also make the system a multiple boot with an XP system on C:,
> > E:, & F: C: is SG 160GB
> > D: is a 22GB portion of C:
> > E: is 2 SG 80 GB Raid 1 Mirrorred drives (I've had 2 crashes in 6
> > months) F:is a WD 120GB a rebuilt replacement for the the original
> > failure.
> >
> > F: boot does not work and that is the disk with all of the installed
> > HW & SW
> >
> > Certainly there must be a way to have the progams already installed
> > on F: to act as if they have been installed on the E: and D: drives
> > without actually installing them.
> >
> > I hope someone can tell me how to do this. It is most distressing to
> > be required to reinstall about 50 (including utilities) programs.
>
>
> Are you saying that you have installed programs on F: and that these
> programs had been installed under Windows XP, but Windows XP has since been
> cleanly reinstalled?
>
> Sorry, but there is no way to use those installed programs, and they have to
> be reinstalled from scratch. Installed programs (all but the very occasionl
> tiny program) have many components and references all over the operating
> system (in the registry and elsewhere).When you reinstalled Windows, all of
> this was lost.
>
> This is the main reason why having a separate drive or partition for
> installed programs isn't really a useful thing to do.
>
> --
> Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
> Please reply to the newsgroup
>
>
>