Ok, looks like my worst luck did strike and I was unable to recover windowsxp after trying to merge two partitions on that hard drive with Partition Magic 8 Pro. It keeps saying "NTLDR is missing" on startup, I tried a few fixes; running recovery console off the winxp cd and copying over the ntldr files from the 386 folder on the CD, and rebuilding the boot.ini with bootcfg. Nothing works, still keeps saying "NTLDR is missing" and won't boot.. I'd be able to fix this if system restore was actually useful in that instance. Repair Install was not given as an option which is why I had to use recovery console.
Then I took a new hard drive that was sitting around and wiped it with eraser (had a bunch of bad viruses from the previous owner, unremovable by format/anti-virus), reformatted into ntfs and reinstalled windowsxp. Then installed all service packs and now in the process of installing my other software. Is there any way to migrate my files and settings from that old installation? Can't use Windows Files and Settings transfer wizard since it asks me to boot into the old installation and copy the files there... which seems pointless to me when it's right here in my PC on the other hard drive. Sigh @ Microsoft. Any utilities that can do this?
Then I took a new hard drive that was sitting around and wiped it with eraser (had a bunch of bad viruses from the previous owner, unremovable by format/anti-virus), reformatted into ntfs and reinstalled windowsxp. Then installed all service packs and now in the process of installing my other software. Is there any way to migrate my files and settings from that old installation? Can't use Windows Files and Settings transfer wizard since it asks me to boot into the old installation and copy the files there... which seems pointless to me when it's right here in my PC on the other hard drive. Sigh @ Microsoft. Any utilities that can do this?