My computer crashed last week, when I bought a win xp home ed. from staples and loaded it onto my computer it put it in drive (D) recovery and not drive (C) where it should have gone, now I've got all these problems with my drive (D) low free space and no way to fix it. All my music and pictures are saved on back up disks now I either need to start from scratch but don't know how. Can someone either give me a step by step guide to doing all of this and making sure that this time it loads on my hard drive (C) this time, thank you. 160 hd 2 gig memory

1. Put the windows Xp CD into your cd drive. 2. Restart your computer. 3. It will say press any key to boot from CD. 4.Windows xp setup will come up. 5.Let it load! :P 6. It will ask you if you want a partition. 7. Press enter on the drive you want Windows to be on. 8. Wait for it to install. 9. SUCCESS!!!!

Also since you have overwritten the recovery partition and you now have a retail edition of XP you might as well delete it as it is no longer functional. This will let you reclaim the disk space. You will see during the setup when you run the XP disk that you can delete the partitions, make it so that you only have one partition and format it. Then install XP on the newly created full size partition which will by default become your C drive.

I'd remove the partitions then create one new partition that is NOT the total size of the drive. After you format and reload the OS, you can go into Disk Management and partition and format the remaining space. I recommend that data to be stored on a partition that is not the OS partition. Which saves you from having to backup your data if a reinstall of Windows is required at a later time. "So won’t you give this man his wings What a shame To have to beg you to see We’re not all the same What a shame" - Shinedown

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