Interesting problemette with XP

[buckmacuk]

Hi there. To fix things up after a hard drive failure, I've just had to do a repair install of XP.

On my system, W2000 is the primary system dual bootable with XP. I have 3 drives in the machine.

Disk 0 is primary C: and logical E:, Disk 1 is primary F:, logical G: and primary H: (with the XP system on it) while the third disk Disk 2 is dynamic as D:

Don't ask why - it's historical and goes back a long way. Anyway, it's worked just fine for me, and XP in its original install saw the drives in exactly the same way.

Now, yesterday to recover from the fact that neither Drive Image nor True Image were capable of restoring the XP drive correctly (both of them XP hung at the full res pale blue screen with the XP logo displayed and an active cursor) I booted from CD-ROM (this is Disk 3) and did a repair install.

Now, the drives are all over the place which is causing a lot of the installed stuff to fail. I've managed to put most of them back as they should be except for the boot drive for XP which was H: and is now G:

Disk manager will not allow me to change it since it is the boot drive.

Any ideas as to how I can do this - or do I have to bite the bullet and completely dump XP and start over??

Thanks in advance for any help - cheers, Chris B

 

[buckmacuk]

An interesting update to this:

Just re-booted into XP - opened disk manager, and - wait for it - drives were 'magically' in the correct places!

Great. Decided to do some sorting out of other problems (like wrong mouse driver showing up and bits of video tools missing) and had all sorts of odd errors. Went back to disk manager and:

Disk G: was now K: and Disk H: (the boot drive for XP) was back to being G:. What the hell is going on here??

This is doing my head in. Operating systems which arbitrarily move their disk naming without any warning? What does it think it's doing?

Anyone any ideas please? I just hope I don't have to do a clean install - it's not the time to put the OS on - it's all the other stuff!

Cheers, Chris.

 

[montag451]

best backup some stuff, just in case.

Is there anything in event viewer that gives out warnings or errors?

 

[buckmacuk]

Oh well, finally bit the bullet and re-wrote the 'disk' from the backup and did a repair install - all is now well.

Don't really know WTF went wrong, but it was certainly odd.

Cheers all, Chris.