Very odd hard drive problems

[Christoph]

I'm having some serious issues with my WinXP installation. To fix them, I
figured I'd do a repair install. After I insert my XP disk and reboot, when
it gets to the dialogue where it asks which partition I want to install XP
to, it's showing my hard drives but not correctly. What is normally my C:
drive while I am in WinXP is showing up in this dialogue as my F: drive.
When I go to select that drive to install XP to, I get an error message
saying "Windows XP cannot recognize the partition you selected" and it
instructs me to go to the prevous screen and select a different one or
delete and recreate the partition. What's going on? Why is it doing this?

thnx,
Christoph

 

[Ted Zieglar]

How do you know that reinstalling Windows will fix your issues?

 

[Gerry Cornell]

Christoph

Is this computer dual booting? How is it partitioned and what is located
where?

What are your serious issues with your Windows XP installation?

--

Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England

Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[Christoph]

How do you know that reinstalling Windows will fix your issues?

I don't. But I've tried everything else.

thnx,
Christoph

 

[Christoph]

Is this computer dual booting? How is it partitioned and what is located

where?

No, it's not. I've got 2 drives, each with just one partition. My primary
drive has the XP installed on it and my slave has my applications installed.
During the setup, it is showing my slave drive as drive C: and my primary
drive as drive F:

What are your serious issues with your Windows XP installation?

Something is wrong with the registry and I no longer have access to do
anything with many of the keys, even when logged in as the computer admin.
This presents problems when applications are trying to write to the registry
(such as when Outlook Express tries to make itself the default mail app).

thnx,
Christoph

 

[Gerry Cornell]

Christoph

How long have these problems been going on?

Have you ever physical physically removed either drive?

Are you getting the drive details from Windows Explorer? What other non-
hard drives are showing and how lettered?

Please look in the System and Application logs in Event Viewer for
Warning and Error Reports over the last 2 days use and post copies here.

You can access Event Viewer by selecting Start, Administrative Tools,
and Event Viewer. When researching the meaning of the error,
information regarding Event ID, Source and Description are important.

HOW TO: View and Manage Event Logs in Event Viewer in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;enus;308427&Product=winxp

Part of the Description of the error will include a link, which you should
double click for further information. You can copy using copy and paste.
Often the link will, however, say there is no further information.
http://go.microsoft.com/fw.link/events.asp
(Please note the hyperlink above is for illustration purposes only)

A tip for posting copies of Error Reports! Run Event Viewer and double
click on the error you want to copy. In the window, which appears is a
button resembling two pages. Double click the button and close Event
Viewer. Now start your message (email) and do a paste into the body
of the message. This will paste the info from the Event Viewer Error
Report complete with links into the message. Make sure this is the
first paste after exiting from Event Viewer.


Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
FCA

Stourport, Worcs, England
Enquire, plan and execute.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Please tell the newsgroup how any
suggested solution worked for you.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[Wouter Willemse]

Did you try fixing the permission on the registry hives that are broken?
Give the user read/write access with regedit and see if that fixes the
matter? (in case you never did any registry permission stuff, just
right-click whatever needs changing, check permissions...from there on it
works identical to NTFS permissions).

Reinstalling sometimes fixes stuff, but in my opinion it is usually "garbage
in is garbage out"...

For the drive letters, sound like the drive with the OS on it does not have
a primary partition, else it should be listed before a secondary drive.

 

[Ted Zieglar]

So you're going through the time and trouble of reinstalling Windows,
re-configuring your preferences, installing all the updates and drivers, and
coping with problems you may encounter...without knowing if it will do any
good? And without knowing whether your problem has anything to do with
Windows in the first place?

In my opinion you would be better served by having a professional diagnose
your problems and explain to you what went wrong, so you can avoid those
problems in the future.

 

[Christoph]

Did you try fixing the permission on the registry hives that are broken?

Give the user read/write access with regedit and see if that fixes the
matter? (in case you never did any registry permission stuff, just
right-click whatever needs changing, check permissions...from there on it
works identical to NTFS permissions).

Yes, I tried doing that. For example, one of my hosed registry item (hive,
is it?) is HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto. As I'm sure you are aware, it
governs the functionality of the mailto: protocol.
When I click on that item/hive, I get a dialogue that says "Cannot open
mailto:
Error while opening key". Right clicking on permissions shows that none of
the checkboxes are checked and noone has rights. I add the administrator
user (who I am logged in as at the time) with full permissions. When I
click
the 'Apply' button, I get an error saying I do not have permission to change
the permissions. *sigh*

Reinstalling sometimes fixes stuff, but in my opinion it is usually
"garbage in is garbage out"...

True. But I've tried everything else I can think of short of taking it to
Best
Buy (or somewhere similar) and unfortunately, I don't have the funds.

For the drive letters, sound like the drive with the OS on it does not
have a primary partition, else it should be listed before a secondary
drive.

I actually figured out what was going on with this one. Something I did not
mention in my original post (because I did not think it was relevant) is
that I
have Norton GoBack installed. I'm not exactly sure why, but evidently it
changes the partition type to have a value of 0x44. Running a utility
called
ptedit (which I found during my searches in what might be going wrong), I
was able to see that the type was changed to the above value. When I
changed the partition type to have a value of 0x07 (NTFS bootable), the
windows setup was able to see the drive as the primary (C but then, for
whatever reason, if I bypassed the initial WinXP setup and let the PC boot,
Norton GoBack would encounter an error and force the PC to reboot. If
I changed the partition type back to have a value of 0x44, GoBack was
happy and the PC booted normally.
That was very funky.

thnx,
Christoph