Re: fresh install of XP Pro - quick question
On Sun, 23 Mar 2008 23:10:12 -0400, "Niteowl" <me@somewhere.com>
wrote:
>
>"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?
Go into motherboard BIOS setup, Hard Disk Boot Priority
(Award/Phoenix) or Hard Disk Drives (AMI) setting, and move the SATA
disk to the top of the list of drives. This should tell Windows setup
that the SATA is the drive that the motherboard boots from, making its
active primary partition the Windows system partition where the boot
files should be placed..
>
>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
>