XP boot files and drive letter issues.

[Notorious Biggles]

I've tried some Googling, which led me here and I've searched the forums here, but couldn't quite find what I was looking for.

To begin with I had a nice working PC, running XP Home, updated to SP2. One day we had a falling out and that Windows install decided to kill itself. Repair installs didn't work and the registry was a bit screwed up as well, even after trying to reload previously working versions. In the end I had to face the fact that I was going to need to do a full reinstall. But first I needed to recover some data.

So what I did was I fitted another hard drive, an IDE one, to complement my current two SATA drives. I installed XP on this IDE drive but never did update it or anything as I only planned on having it bootable to copy needed data onto before wiping the SATA drives and starting from scratch. This went ok. I ended up with the IDE drive as the C drive and the two SATA drives as D and E. The D drive is the main drive, which was originally by operating system's drive.

After moving all my data elsewhere, I booted from my XP CD. Loaded the SATA drive via floppy and then continued with a new installation. Formatted D and installed it there. I realise that was where my problems began, because I never disconnected the C drive, which is the IDE drive currently hanging out the side of my PC. Everything seemed to go ok, Windows installed and I updated to SP2 and started installing all my junk. I then copied my data back from the C drive, powered down and removed the C drive. Turn on and... Invalid System Disk error. After the wailing and gnashing of teeth, I reconnected the C drive. It's worth pointing out that when I had both drives with Windows installations on them that I had a boot menu. I always just pressed enter and that took me into the installation that I had updated with SP2. Testing the other option (both being Windows XP Home Edition in the boot menu) took me into the original XP install that I never updated, which is what I suspected.

Having booted into Windows, I have a look at the root of both the C and D drives. Turns out only the C drive has any files in the root, D not having any besides the pagefile. So what I did is I copied boot.ini, ntldr, NTDETECT.COM, IO.SYS, CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT and MSDOS.SYS to a floppy disk. I only have a very basic knowledge of what these files are, but I think I can do without all apart from ntldr, NTDETECT.COM and maybe boot.ini. Regardless of that, I edited the boot.ini file on the floppy so I could affirm which install was on which drive. I didn't know which was the IDE drive and which was the SATA drive, so it was a case of trial and error, but I eventually got the boot.ini file on the floppy to point to D drive, which is what I wanted, and that enabled me to use that boot floppy (oh so retro!) to get into XP when I had the C drive, that being the IDE drive, disconnected. What I've established is that the XP install on the D drive, is the one that has been updated to SP2.

Thing is, if I go to the Disk Management section of the Computer Management console (by right clicking My Computer and selecting manage), I can see that the D drive is listed as having the status Healthy (Boot). When I went into this console with the C drive connected as well, the D drive was still listed as the boot drive, but the C drive was Healthy (System). Thus, my questions...

Question 1:

How do I get Windows to boot from just the hard drive, meaning the D drive? I have a bunch of files on a floppy disk, and they'll boot me into Windows. But putting these files in the root of the D drive (this is the SATA one remember, and yes, I did install the driver during Windows setup) does not make it bootable. I then get the Invalid System Disk error when I try to boot without the floppy. That makes me a sad panda.

Question 2:

How do I get the D drive back to being a C drive, like in the good old days? I found a knowledge base article from MS about this; it talked about using regedt32.exe and going to HKEY_LM\System\MountedDevices and editing the name of the keys, replacing the letters to rename the drives. I know it much simpler to do with non-system drives though. Reason I hesitated on changing this is that there is still a key for the C drive, even though it is disconnected.

I know I goofed up by not disconnecting the IDE drive when I started reinstalling stuff. I'm paying for it now. Having the system bootable without the help of a floppy disk is my priority however. The having my main drive as the C drive is on the list because A) it annoys me and B) whilst I recovered my iTunes library, iTunes thinks everything is on the C drive. That's a lot of stuff to manually find. I think I've included everything of relevance. If not, just ask. I'm rather impressed by this forum and by nLite. If you guys could save me from having to reinstall from scratch again you'd be heroes.

Thanks in advance

Biggles

[LLXX]

Now I know how to boot XP from a floppy

Question 1:

How do I get Windows to boot from just the hard drive, meaning the D drive? I have a bunch of files on a floppy disk, and they'll boot me into Windows. But putting these files in the root of the D drive (this is the SATA one remember, and yes, I did install the driver during Windows setup) does not make it bootable. I then get the Invalid System Disk error when I try to boot without the floppy. That makes me a sad panda.

Use the floppy to boot into Command Prompt mode, then run fixboot command to restore the boot sector. That is what's missing from your drive.

Question 2:

How do I get the D drive back to being a C drive, like in the good old days? I found a knowledge base article from MS about this; it talked about using regedt32.exe and going to HKEY_LM\System\MountedDevices and editing the name of the keys, replacing the letters to rename the drives. I know it much simpler to do with non-system drives though. Reason I hesitated on changing this is that there is still a key for the C drive, even though it is disconnected.

Set it as a Primary Master device using the configuration jumper and make sure the BIOS detects it as such. You might also need to disable the IDE controller as well, so SATA gets priority (or set SATA controller as primary). C is assigned to the first fixed disk in the system. Edited April 8, 2006 by LLXX

[Notorious Biggles]

Thanks for the response.

In the end I just copied all the data I needed off the drive again and bit the bullet to reinstall AGAIN. I'd tried fixboot and fixmbr from the recovery console (with the other drives disconnected) and nothing would make Windows realise that the SATA drive was the System Volume. We live and learn I guess.