Xp Install Issue any ideas or suggestions

[Keith Ahlstrom]

Hi

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

 

[Dave]

I've had this happen and the quickest solution I've found
is to disconnect the thing that the XP installer thought
was C:, and then do a new installation and then reattach
the alleged C: device.

If anyone has a more elegant way, I'd love to hear about
it.

(I've even had it decide that zip drive was C:.)

 

[Guest]

Although I've never had to do this there is a tool inside XP to change driver letters and paths. go>start\control panel\administrative tools\computer management and then expand the "storage" tree on the left by clicking the + and then click disk management and then right click on the drive you want to change in the right window and then choose "change drive letter and paths---" From there I can't help. I just know where this is as I click around a lot in XP to find stuff. Perhaps a MVP could give you further details. It looks pretty self explanatory but as I only have one HDD and no partitions (I've never understood the need on a stand alone home PC) I've never needed to change any letters. Good luck.

 

[Dave]

-----Original Message-----
computer management

Unfortunately, the one partition this won't allow
reassigning is the system partition.

 

[Alex Nichol]

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?

That is characteristic of *also* having a Zip drive present at the time
of setup. You would have to start over, delete the present XP partition
and setup anew, this time without such things connected. It may happen
also with other external storage devices