Re: fresh install of XP Pro - quick question
"Niteowl" <me@somewhere.com> wrote in message
news:evZvdbUjIHA.5956@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
> Hi,
>
> I just installed a new 300G HD, partitioned it prior to rebooting to
> install a fresh copy of XP Pro.
>
> I have 3 physical drives now, the 2 that were in there were partitioned as
> C: G: H:, and D: E: F: (not sure why it was like that)
>
> Before installing XP I copied All data from D thru H onto the new SATA
> drive which I had partitioned into I: J: K:, leaving I: as a
> primary/active partition, and J: and K: as logical drives.
>
> When I booted up from the XP CD, I deleted and repartitioned the 2 120G
> HD's, and also deleted the I: drive and repartitioned it so it would take
> on the C: nomenclature, which it did.
>
> When I started it to formatting, it did the D: drive first, I'm not sure
> why but I let it go while I was doing other things elsewhere.
>
> When it finished installing Windows, it booted up and then I was going in
> to change the drive letters to be what I wanted... the new drive I wanted
> to be C: D: and E
it was C: J: & K
, but the D: drive (first partition
> on one of the 120G drives wouldn't let me change it and said it was a boot
> drive. ??????
>
> I looked at the contents of D: and it has the boot.ini, ntldr, and the
> NTDETECT.COM files on it in addition to only the "System volume
> Information" folder. No idea why it did this. Is this normal behavior?
> Is it possible to simply move those files on to the C: drive, or do I have
> to completely reinstall XP again, or will it do the same thing again?
>
> Only thing I can think of to disconnect the secondary drives till I get XP
> installed if there's no way to easily fix this.
I tried editing the boot.ini file and moving it to the C: drive, it would
not work, so perhaps there's a registry hack that would make this work????
I have reinstalled XP again, and it did the same thing, would not let me
continue without writing to the D: drive... (secondary drive)
I'm not sure why unless it has something to do with the fact that the other
2 partitions on the main drive are logical drives.. still ..... why won't it
just write to the C: drive?
I'm hoping there's a registry edit or something rather than digging this box
out and physically removing the other two drives.. I can't format those
partitions as it is all my data files from the previous life of this box.
tons of mp3's, avi's, archived programs, etc.
Anyone have a fix for this??
thanks,
niteowl