Boot drive letter changing in XP recovery console

[Bat123Man]

Hello,

I experienced a nasty system experience trying to help a friend determine if his CPU was toast. We both had SocketA AMD chips, and his computer died. Since I also had an AMD, we took his CPU out of his machine and dropped it into my mobo. Bad mistake. As soon as we hit the power, smoke started coming out of the CPU and my mobo was fried. I think it is the temp sensor under the CPU which melted, but I really don't know. But that is not the problem. I have just purchased an Asus P5N-E, Core 2 Duo 6420, 2 GB Platinum 6400 OCZ RAM, and an 8800GTS. Nice little upgrade I have to say.

My system has 3 HDs, 2 of which are connected via the IDE cables (this is via FW). The boot partition which has XP is the D drive. When my system used to run normally, it was set up like this :

Disk0
C: Win2K
D: XP
E: Programs
F: Files

Disk1
G: crap

DVD burner
H:

CD burner
I:

Since I now have all new hardware but was unable to prepare my system to receive it properly (ie. delete all hardware, etc.), XP blue screens on boot. I have tried to go into the recovery panel to have it try to fix itself, but it finds the XP partition and lists it as F:. If I pick the option to install XP, it finds both the Win2K partition and the XP partition, but it lists Win2K as C (corrrect), and XP as F (incorrect). Is there any way to change this back to D: ? I am afraid if I try to fix it and it thinks it is F:, it will really mess things up. I have an ASR backup, but that won't do me much good since it will only restore me to an XP with my previous hardware. I can also reinstall XP completely, but only if it allows me to drop it into the D: drive.

I also tried disabling the DVD burner and the second drive (G drive), and that got me one letter closer as the next XP CD boot showed XP on E. I figure if I can get it to D via any means, I can install onto that partition and then add the other drives later. Any ideas?

Thanks,
BM.

 

[Bat123Man]

Ah, I figured it out although it was sheer luck. At 2AM when I was too tired to continue, the computer was sitting at the "Hit F3 to exit setup"screen of the XP "boot from CD" menu. It still had the F: drive highlighted below as the one it wanted to try to either repair or install a new version of XP into. Since I was so friggin tired, I hit the F key instead of the intended F3 key. The new installation started. I just let it go and went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, the installaiton was stuck with 34 minutes left saying it couldn't find cmprops.dll. I could see that file in the directory it was looking for on the XP CD. At first I thought it was a dirty CD, but that wasn't it. This is an installation bug common to trying to install XP with no service pack, onto a broken XP with SP2. There is a security issue and it won't overlay the DLLs. There is no real solution if you can't boot into XP to run a command to fix the security file. The only thing I could do was click SKIP, and proceed to the next file it coulnd't find. About 80 skips later, it completed and rebooted. Amazingly to me, XP started up albeit with many errors and very very slowly, and with both ACPI missing and System Restore broken. IE was also broken, and Windows update couldn't validate my machine so I couldn't get updates, even after I reactivated. I then downloaded SP2 from MS (the network installation version since Windows Update was broken), and installed that. That fixed most of the problems since my OS was half XP SP0 and half XP SP2. I have been fixing errors ever since, but the system is back working now.

The result? The screen asking me if I wanted to repair or overinstall XP in F: is incorrect. When XP booted, it booted into D: as I hoped it would. The conclusion is that the F: drive was a calculated drive based on what devices were master, what partition was set to Extended, etc. It was not taken from my boot.ini. But when I allowed it to proceed, it picked the correct drive letter.

BM.