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    Why did this happen?

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by bluuz, Dec 27, 2007.

  1. bluuz

    bluuz Notebook Guru

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    This is a little OT because it doesn't involve a notebook, but I thought one of you guys might help. A few months ago, I bought a Compaq Pentium D machine with Vista installed. I needed to put XP Pro on it to use it on my office network, so today I went about installing XP. I fooled around for a while looking for the right SATA drivers but the motherboard, although made by Asus, is proprietary and not listed on the Asus site. Rather than spend more time fiddling around, I went out and bought a 160 GB IDE drive, figuring I'd use the SATA drive in something else.

    XP Pro installed fine, but after I set it up, I realized the root drive was H/:. One of the flash media drive was designed as C\:. Anyone know why this happened? I was working around the office during the install and I might have missed something while going through the menus. The only thing that worries me is that some of the older programs I use might only install to C drive. You can't change the letter of the boot drive in Administrative Tools.

    I'm wondering if the fact I disabled SATA/RAID in the BIOS might have caused this.

    Any advice is appreciated, because if I'm going to reinstall I want to do it before installing my apps.
     
    bluuz, Dec 27, 2007
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  2. kegobeer

    kegobeer 1 hr late but moving fast

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    Disabling the SATA in the BIOS shouldn't have done anything. However, I've seen this when the boot order is changed and not restored immediately after the initial install (copying files) completes.

    The only way to fix this is to reinstall. I've read and tried the registry changes to put the boot drive back to C:, but I've never gotten them to work.
     
    kegobeer, Dec 27, 2007
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  3. bluuz

    bluuz Notebook Guru

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    Yeah that could be it. I changed the boot order to boot from CD when I installed XP and didn't switch it back when Setup prompted me to reboot.
     
    bluuz, Dec 27, 2007
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  4. bluuz

    bluuz Notebook Guru

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    When I got back in my office yesterday I found out what happened. I had left a SD card in the media drive during the Windows install and when I got to the setup screen where you choose which drive to install Windows on, the 1gb SD was on the top of the list and the hard drive was the next option. I selected the hard drive not realizing at the time what the 1 gb partition was. Hence, Windows must have thought the SD card was the primary drive and designated it as C:\. !!!! My fault I suppose because I forgot to change the boot order back.

    #@&*$!! So I get to spend another hour or so reinstalling.
     
    bluuz, Dec 29, 2007
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