System drive is D?

[Bob]

My son just did a fresh (Fdisk, format) install of Windows
2000 and now the system drive in Windows is D. There is no
C.
How can that be?

Thanks.
bob

 

[PKS]

It's just a drive letter and a way of identifying a
partition. Perhaps in the 'old days' C: was needed or
assumed to be the system drive but to have it as D:
doesnt pose any problems...

 

[Gary Goodman]

I'm thinking it's "there" but how could it be there and
not there at the same time?

Perhaps due to the way he did the install, he chose the
2nd drive. Perhaps the 2nd drive was formatted as FAT32
and therefore readable from a DOS prompt. I don't quite
understand, but there are other variables. The C drive
could be Hidden, but that would take some know how. It
could somehow be misformatted in such a way that it is
partially recognized as the C drive during boot, but then
the OS doesn't recognize it as a drive. Normally what
happens then is that D becomes named C, since C
is "missing". Normally the system drive that is booted is
C (where Boot.INI and NTLDR reside) but the boot partition
is the one where WINNT is located. I know that sounds
backwards. It's possible to have the boot start on C, like
even on a small FAT drive, then have the BOOT.INI point to
the D drive to load the rest of the Operating System in
D:\WINNT.
One more, some systems don't come with a Windows disk per
se but a "restore" CD that also puts a hidden partition on
the drive for BIOS or even for the setup files. That is
normally hidden and not even recognized, except during
boot up when "restore" might be an option key. What if
that were partially corrupted such that it claimed a drive
letter in error, but yet was invisible to the OS?
Just a bunch of wild ideas.

 

[Dave Patrick]

To do a clean install, either boot the Windows 2000 CD-Rom or setup disks.
The set of four install disks can be created from your Win2k CD-rom; change
to the \bootdisk directory on the cd-rom and execute makeboot.exe (from dos)
or makebt32.exe (from 32 bit) and follow the prompts.

When you get to the point, delete the existing NTFS and or other partitions
found. After you delete the partition(s) abort the install, then again
restart the pc booting the CD-Rom or setup disks to avoid unexpected drive
letter assignments with your new install.