Help! Unable to reinstall Windows XP Pro on main partition

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support (More info?)

Hi everyone,

I pray that someone can help me with this...!

I have a IBM Thinkpad laptop, 20 GB hard drive. In the year since I
bought it I reinstalled Windows XP Professional twice without any
problems.

3 months ago, I decided to partition my hard drive:

Drive "C"= 14GB (Main Windows / Program files etc)
Drive "E" = 6GB (Named "My Stuff" - for all music, docs etc)

....using Acronis Partition Expert. I done this because I wanted a
separate 'drive' for all my music, documents etc. The other reason I
done this was because someone told me it would be useful if I ever
wanted to reinstall Windows, because I could do this on the C partition
and leave all my important data intact on the E Drive.

So that's what I decided to do yesterday - Since disabling my firewall
I have had some problems with spyware plus the registry was loaded with
program entries that I had experimented with - anyway, in a nutshell, I
wanted to reinstall Windows on the C partition.

So using Partition Expert, I sent in a request to delete the C
partition on reboot (I had used this Partition Expert command in the
past to reinstall Windows when the drive was unpartitioned without any
problems. I remember having to do this because the old Windows
installation was always detected and it messed the Win XP setup).

But when I put in the Win XP setup disk afterwards, I was constantly
getting "Invalid Partition Table" error messages after the first stage
of the process and reboot.

The first stage always shows me what i want to see:

Partitions available:
C: 14 GB available
E "My Stuff": 6 GB (2 GB available)

.... meaning that all my E drive data is intact as I want it. I try to
install Windows XP on C using a variety of methods but all end up with
that error message on reboot.

Here is what I've tried:

1. Deleting the C partition (using the "C" command) and reformatting
it - both with NTFS and Quick NTFS formatting

2. Recreating a new partition on C - which is basically 14GB - again
reformatting that to NTFS...

3. Changing the BIOS to always boot from the CD Rom - but that just
caused Stage one of Win XP setup to loop - so I deactivated that!


Nothing is working however, and every time the laptop reboots I get
"Invalid Partition Table"

Am I supposed to use the Recovery Console? I have no floppy drive
either! I need to find a way to preserve that 4-5 GB of data on the E
drive as I do not have most of it backed up elsewhere! This seems to
definitely connect to the partitions because I had no problems
reinstalling Windows when the drive was a single partition..

If anyone can help I would be very grateful...

Jo