XP is on C... but it boots from D... why?

[Dennis]

I just did a fresh install of XP.. I notice it did something kind of
strange.... I installed it on a 50gig partition (C drive) and left all
my old data on the 200g partition (D drive)... While installing my
motherboard drivers I got: "Error: Cannot find boot.ini " which I
found very curious.. I've reinstalled on the 50gig partition many times
and never saw that before...

So I look around and true enough my boot.ini ntldr and ntdetect are all
on drive D while XP is on drive C... so its booting from D... why
did it install like that? Is it just me or is this strange?

 

[johns]

You have to watch that install cd like a hawk. Stupid
thing will arbitrarily hand your partitions the wrong
drive letters. I find that I have to delete the selected
partition with the wrong drive letter, and then it
will get the correct drive letter. Only once in a while
does it hand the c-drive the wrong drive letter, but
when it does you can miss it, and get what you see.
Still, it sounds weird that you got a partial install
to the d-drive. Almost sounds like you have an
IDE drive on IDE1, and a SATA on sata 0, and
you have RAID enabled. That will mess up drive
letters too, plus the SATA will not work as boot.

johns

 

[Jack F. Twist]

I just did a fresh install of XP.. I notice it did something kind of
strange.... I installed it on a 50gig partition (C drive) and left all
my old data on the 200g partition (D drive)... While installing my
motherboard drivers I got: "Error: Cannot find boot.ini " which I
found very curious.. I've reinstalled on the 50gig partition many times
and never saw that before...

So I look around and true enough my boot.ini ntldr and ntdetect are all
on drive D while XP is on drive C... so its booting from D... why
did it install like that? Is it just me or is this strange?

Not strange. If you want to force it to boot from C then temporarily
disconnect your D drive until the install is completely finished.

 

[Dennis]

You have to watch that install cd like a hawk. Stupid
thing will arbitrarily hand your partitions the wrong
drive letters. I find that I have to delete the selected
partition with the wrong drive letter, and then it
will get the correct drive letter. Only once in a while
does it hand the c-drive the wrong drive letter, but
when it does you can miss it, and get what you see.
Still, it sounds weird that you got a partial install
to the d-drive. Almost sounds like you have an
IDE drive on IDE1, and a SATA on sata 0, and
you have RAID enabled. That will mess up drive
letters too, plus the SATA will not work as boot.

johns

Very interesting.. thanks guys.. and if your curious.. here's the full
story of how I lost a 200 gig partition in the process... note I was
pretty cranky... anything like this ever happen to you guys:

http://tinyurl.com/etxpd

 

[Ian Ozenthroat]

Not strange. If you want to force it to boot from C then temporarily
disconnect your D drive until the install is completely finished.

In his case the D drive is a 200Gb Partition of a 250Gb drive with the C drive taking up the
other 50Gb (as stated) , so disconnecting the D drive is impossible!

 

[John Weiss]

In his case the D drive is a 200Gb Partition of a 250Gb drive with the C drive
taking up the other 50Gb (as stated) , so disconnecting the D drive is
impossible!

In that case any data on D should be backed up, then the entire 250 GB HD
repartitioned and reformatted.

The Windows installation is already munged up, so applications will have to be
re-installed anyway.