I have two 120 GB drives on which, as a safety precaution, I have installed XP pro, fully updated and a variety of programs on both drives.

I have a problem. If "C" drive becomes corrupted (not an infrequent situation) I return it to a raw state using KillDisk utility then Install from CD (In BIOS setup),

but the installation insists on labelling the drive as "F" and not "C". However I found that if I deleted "D" drive, then I could format and install both "C" and "D" normally. But this, of course deleted a perfectly good installation on "D". Latterly I have found that if I physically disconnect "D" drive, then the installation goes to "C" OK. I can then reconnect "D" and identify it in System/Advanced/Systems setup/Edit and "D" is recognizes in "My Computer" Does anyone have any idea why all this nonsense occurs?

I also noted during installation it is not possible to delete "C" as it has 292MB of software necessary for the system, whilst "D" is deletable. As this is the case, I thught it wise to use "D" as my default drive - ha,ha, I have tried both in BIOS setup and in System/Advanced/Systems Setup/Edit to change the default to Drive "D" but it just doesn't work and I need advice as to how to change fthe default boot up rom the primary drive "C" to the slave drive "D"

System is A7N8X deluxe Rev2, AMD 3200+, 512MB PC3200 RAM and two 120GB drives with single partition. OS is XPpro fully updated

If you are starting the Windows XP setup from within one of your Windows XP partitions you wont be able to delete that partition because setup copies files needed for installation onto that partition I believe.

If you have a bootable CD-ROM drive and boot from the CD you should be able to delete either partition, and install the operating system again.

Why don't you run RAID1 mirror setup, rather than having two drivers and installed OS on both? You can either add a PATA RAID PCI card or SATA onboard most MB. A software alternative is to use disk image backup such as Ghost or DiskImage.