Acronis and the mystery OS.

[geoff-h3o]

I woke up one morning to find that Acronis had discovered a 3rd os on my pc. I have 2  xp pro on different hdd s but it tried to boot into this 3rd one but couldn't find the boot file.  The only info it will give me is:

local disk () Fat16  982-4mb system partition.

None of my 3 hdds were formatted Fat16. I did wipe the packard bell oem xp home to install xp pro but that was  a while ago . Acronis  os selector is installed on each xp pro copy  and they both say the same thing. Is it gremlins using it while I'm asleep?

[Spoiler]

sounds like a temp drive. Temp space used to hold files during a OS install. Normally its hidden and you don't see it.

[patio]

DOS or an older and i mean older ver. of Windows come to mind...or it could be mis-reading a Recovery partition...
Where did you get the drive from ?

[geoff-h3o]

My PC is a Packard bell imedia 1559, 2.8ghz , original sata drive came with it,with xp home preinstalled. There is unallocated space on that drive but only approx 700mb, but also about 10gb  not mentioned by disc director ( its a 160gb drive but disc dir. only notices 2 partitions and 'unallocated space totalling 150gb). I've also installed a new maxtor drive and put 2nd xp pro on it, & a wd raptor, which was 2nd hand,but I formatted.
It puzzled me  that this  "unknown os" wasn't given a drive no.

I suppose that the original drive is still tatooed - and maybe still has recovery partitions & other stuff on it..?I don't know how thoroughly Acronis wipes drives.

T