fresh install of XP Pro - quick question

[Niteowl]

Hi,

I just installed a new 300G HD, partitioned it prior to rebooting to install
a fresh copy of XP Pro.

I have 3 physical drives now, the 2 that were in there were partitioned as
C: G: H:, and D: E: F: (not sure why it was like that)

Before installing XP I copied All data from D thru H onto the new SATA drive
which I had partitioned into I: J: K:, leaving I: as a primary/active
partition, and J: and K: as logical drives.

When I booted up from the XP CD, I deleted and repartitioned the 2 120G
HD's, and also deleted the I: drive and repartitioned it so it would take on
the C: nomenclature, which it did.

When I started it to formatting, it did the D: drive first, I'm not sure why
but I let it go while I was doing other things elsewhere.

When it finished installing Windows, it booted up and then I was going in to
change the drive letters to be what I wanted... the new drive I wanted to be
C: D: and Eit was C: J: & K, but the D: drive (first partition on one of
the 120G drives wouldn't let me change it and said it was a boot drive.
??????

I looked at the contents of D: and it has the boot.ini, ntldr, and the
NTDETECT.COM files on it in addition to only the "System volume Information"
folder. No idea why it did this. Is this normal behavior? Is it possible
to simply move those files on to the C: drive, or do I have to completely
reinstall XP again, or will it do the same thing again?

Only thing I can think of to disconnect the secondary drives till I get XP
installed if there's no way to easily fix this.


thanks,
niteowl

 

[Niteowl]

just had a thought.. if I just edited the boot.ini, and then put it on the
C: drive, would that work?

here's the boot.ini:

[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

what would I need to change? (just change the "rdisk(2)" to "rdisk(1)" )
??

thanks,
niteowl

 

[Big Al]

Hi,

I just installed a new 300G HD, partitioned it prior to rebooting to install
a fresh copy of XP Pro.

I have 3 physical drives now, the 2 that were in there were partitioned as
C: G: H:, and D: E: F: (not sure why it was like that)

Before installing XP I copied All data from D thru H onto the new SATA drive
which I had partitioned into I: J: K:, leaving I: as a primary/active
partition, and J: and K: as logical drives.

When I booted up from the XP CD, I deleted and repartitioned the 2 120G
HD's, and also deleted the I: drive and repartitioned it so it would take on
the C: nomenclature, which it did.

When I started it to formatting, it did the D: drive first, I'm not sure why
but I let it go while I was doing other things elsewhere.

When it finished installing Windows, it booted up and then I was going in to
change the drive letters to be what I wanted... the new drive I wanted to be
C: D: and Eit was C: J: & K, but the D: drive (first partition on one of
the 120G drives wouldn't let me change it and said it was a boot drive.
??????

I looked at the contents of D: and it has the boot.ini, ntldr, and the
NTDETECT.COM files on it in addition to only the "System volume Information"
folder. No idea why it did this. Is this normal behavior? Is it possible
to simply move those files on to the C: drive, or do I have to completely
reinstall XP again, or will it do the same thing again?

Only thing I can think of to disconnect the secondary drives till I get XP
installed if there's no way to easily fix this.


thanks,
niteowl

You'll probably get more ideas, but I'm a back to basics person.
Especially if I have a tricky situation. Comes from days of hardware
tech. Remove everything but the MB and PS and then see if the basics work.
I would boot from the CD with only the 1 drive as master that I want to
load. One to prevent me from screwing up anything and 2, just
because. Then when the install starts select the drive, delete the
partition, remake it, and label it as C:. Then load the OS and get it
up. Once up, shutdown and add the other hardware and reboot. You can
change drive letters all you want in XP. PS. I keep an old win98 boot
floppy with fdisk and format on it too just for the heck of it.

Hope you get better ideas. Good luck.

 

[Niteowl]

Hi,

I just installed a new 300G HD, partitioned it prior to rebooting to
install a fresh copy of XP Pro.

I have 3 physical drives now, the 2 that were in there were partitioned as
C: G: H:, and D: E: F: (not sure why it was like that)

Before installing XP I copied All data from D thru H onto the new SATA
drive which I had partitioned into I: J: K:, leaving I: as a
primary/active partition, and J: and K: as logical drives.

When I booted up from the XP CD, I deleted and repartitioned the 2 120G
HD's, and also deleted the I: drive and repartitioned it so it would take
on the C: nomenclature, which it did.

When I started it to formatting, it did the D: drive first, I'm not sure
why but I let it go while I was doing other things elsewhere.

When it finished installing Windows, it booted up and then I was going in
to change the drive letters to be what I wanted... the new drive I wanted
to be C: D: and Eit was C: J: & K, but the D: drive (first partition
on one of the 120G drives wouldn't let me change it and said it was a boot
drive. ??????

I looked at the contents of D: and it has the boot.ini, ntldr, and the
NTDETECT.COM files on it in addition to only the "System volume
Information" folder. No idea why it did this. Is this normal behavior?
Is it possible to simply move those files on to the C: drive, or do I have
to completely reinstall XP again, or will it do the same thing again?

Only thing I can think of to disconnect the secondary drives till I get XP
installed if there's no way to easily fix this.

I tried editing the boot.ini file and moving it to the C: drive, it would
not work, so perhaps there's a registry hack that would make this work????

I have reinstalled XP again, and it did the same thing, would not let me
continue without writing to the D: drive... (secondary drive)
I'm not sure why unless it has something to do with the fact that the other
2 partitions on the main drive are logical drives.. still ..... why won't it
just write to the C: drive?

I'm hoping there's a registry edit or something rather than digging this box
out and physically removing the other two drives.. I can't format those
partitions as it is all my data files from the previous life of this box.
tons of mp3's, avi's, archived programs, etc.

Anyone have a fix for this??

thanks,
niteowl

 

[Niteowl]

Go into motherboard BIOS setup, Hard Disk Boot Priority
(Award/Phoenix) or Hard Disk Drives (AMI) setting, and move the SATA
disk to the top of the list of drives. This should tell Windows setup
that the SATA is the drive that the motherboard boots from, making its
active primary partition the Windows system partition where the boot
files should be placed..

Changed the order of priority,
booted up from the XP CD

the SATA drive appear in the list first, but the drive letter is E: on the
first partition,

the C: designation is on the second HD in the list

I removed the first partition on the SATA, leaving the other two alone, and
removed all partitions on the other 2 ATA drives, Maxtor 120G (2 equal
partitions each).

chose the first partition on the SATA to install XP to, and got the same
following screen as before:

"To install Windows XP on the partition you selected,
Setup must write some files to the following disk:
117240 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]
However, this disk does not contain a Windows XP-compatible partition.
To continue installing Windows XP, return to the windows partition selection
screen and create a Window XP compatible partition on the disk above. If
there is no free space on the disk, delete any existing partition and then
create a new one.
To return to the partition selection screen, press ENTER."

for some reason setup still thinks that 120G drive's first partition is the
C: drive.. ??? Could it be something left over from before?

I used Maxblast to setup the drives as single partition drives, it would not
allow me to setup both of them as "additional storage", it insisted on
making the primary master IDE drive the boot drive.. and when I booted up
with the XP CD, the list of drives confirmed that indeed the C: drive was
the primary master 120G drive, the D: drive was the secondary 120G drive,
and my SATA with 3 partitions was E:, F:, & G:.

so I guess my only recourse is to eliminate those drives until I get the O/S
installed. I'm trying that now.

thanks for the suggestion though, I was hoping it would've worked too..

we'll see what happens...

 

[Niteowl]

Hi Andy and all,

disconnected the 2 120G hd's and XP installed perfectly assigning C, D, & E
drive letters as I wanted in the first place.

plugged back in the 2 secondary drives and they were assigned the
appropriate letters also...

Thanks for the suggestions..

thanks again,
niteowl

Go into motherboard BIOS setup, Hard Disk Boot Priority
(Award/Phoenix) or Hard Disk Drives (AMI) setting, and move the SATA
disk to the top of the list of drives. This should tell Windows setup
that the SATA is the drive that the motherboard boots from, making its
active primary partition the Windows system partition where the boot
files should be placed..

Changed the order of priority,
booted up from the XP CD

the SATA drive appear in the list first, but the drive letter is E: on the
first partition,

the C: designation is on the second HD in the list

I removed the first partition on the SATA, leaving the other two alone,
and removed all partitions on the other 2 ATA drives, Maxtor 120G (2 equal
partitions each).

chose the first partition on the SATA to install XP to, and got the same
following screen as before:

"To install Windows XP on the partition you selected,
Setup must write some files to the following disk:
117240 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]
However, this disk does not contain a Windows XP-compatible partition.
To continue installing Windows XP, return to the windows partition
selection screen and create a Window XP compatible partition on the disk
above. If there is no free space on the disk, delete any existing
partition and then create a new one.
To return to the partition selection screen, press ENTER."

for some reason setup still thinks that 120G drive's first partition is
the C: drive.. ??? Could it be something left over from before?

I used Maxblast to setup the drives as single partition drives, it would
not allow me to setup both of them as "additional storage", it insisted on
making the primary master IDE drive the boot drive.. and when I booted up
with the XP CD, the list of drives confirmed that indeed the C: drive was
the primary master 120G drive, the D: drive was the secondary 120G drive,
and my SATA with 3 partitions was E:, F:, & G:.

so I guess my only recourse is to eliminate those drives until I get the
O/S installed. I'm trying that now.

thanks for the suggestion though, I was hoping it would've worked too..

we'll see what happens...