Problems installing XP Pro

[Keith Ahlstrom]

I have built a bunch of computers and installed windows
on them but I have never seen this situation before and I
am stumped.

The computer has the following set up

Primary IDE master 40 gig HD
Primary IDE slave CD rom

Secondary IDE master 20 gig hard drive (drive was
formatted and contained data)
Secondary IDE slave dvd rom.

This is what the bios reads and the cabling is correct I
placed the XP professional in the cd rom and booted from
it. Everything went fine and it installed XP on the 40
gig drive on the primary IDE.

Here is the puzzle when I boot the system boots from the
40 meg drive on the Primary IDE but it is mapped as drive
F:. XP will not let me reassign the drive letter of the
boot drive. Any ideas what happened and how to switch it
to drive C?

The system is displaying the drives as follows

Secondary IDE drive (20 GIG) is displayed as C:
Primary Slave CDR is displayed as d:
Secondary IDE Slave is E:
Primary IDE drive (40 GIG) is displayed as F:

Using the disk manager I can reassign all the drives to
different letters except the boot drive F:

What do I need to do to make the Primary ide Master drive
that has XP and the system boots from read as drive C:


Thanks
Keith

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Keith.

I think the problem is here:

Secondary IDE master 20 gig hard drive (drive was
formatted and contained data)

This probably contained a Primary Partition that was marked Active
(bootable) - and was plugged in at the time you installed WinXP. One of the
first things WinXP Setup does is detect the hardware in your computer, and
if it finds an Active partition, it assumes that must be Drive C:, so it
assigns the next available letter to the first primary partition on your
current HD0. With your CD and DVD drives using D: and E:, the next
available letter was F: - so Setup assigned that to your "system partition".

To avoid this, leave out the second HD until after WinXP is installed, then
plug it in after Setup has assigned C: to the first partition, as you
expected. Then you can use Disk Management to assign other letters as you
like.

At this stage, the easiest way to solve your problem is to start over.
Unplug the old HD, boot from the WinXP CD-ROM, let it repartition (optional)
and reformat your new HD and install WinXP. Then plug in the old HD and
assign it a drive letter. (Drive X:? It's your choice, really; it doesn't
have to be F:.)

Then you will have to re-install all your applications. Even though their
executables and other files are there, your new WinXP's Registry knows
nothing about them.

For some background, see this KB article:
HOW TO: Change Drive Letter Assignments in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307844

Definition of System Partition and Boot Partition
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;314470

HOW TO: Restore the System/Boot Drive Letter in Windows
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;223188

(This one says it applies to Win2K, but it should also work in WinXP. There
should be a similar article for WinXP, but I can't locate it.)

The Computer Does Not Start After You Change the Active Partition by Using
the Disk Management Tool
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;315261

(This discussion should be interesting, too. Perhaps you can solve your
problem without reinstalling by using the Recovery Console, but I'm not
sure.)

RC