recently reinstalled windows xp pro, need help with a few things

rmrf

Platinum Member
May 14, 2003
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I recently had to RMA my hard drive, so when I got it back I had to reinstall xp. I went through the installation, but when I boot into windows I have the following in 'my computer':

a:floppy
c:zip drive
d:cd drive
e:windows installation

I also noticed that when I go into windows explorer, the folders icons are gone that usually go along side of the folder name. Do I have a screwed up installation, or is this kind of stuff normal when working with microsoft products? Also, when I try to install my motherboard drivers from the manufacturer cd, it gives me an error that it cannot read some of the files, and the driver installation gui comes up blank. I can install the drivers one by one, but I would like to know if it is even worth my time if I have a screwed up installation. I'm not sure if I should reinstall to try and get my windows installation to be on the c: drive, or maybe just live with it. Any help would be great. Here are my system specs:

EPoX 8RDA3+ nforce2 motherboard
PNY GeForce FX5900 128 MB
AMD XP Barton 2500+ oc'd to 3200+
1GB Corsair XMS 3200
Maxtor 120GB SATA HDD
Liteon 24x cdrw
100MB ZIP drive
Mitsumi Floppy
450W PSU

TIA
 

buckmasterson

Senior member
Oct 12, 2002
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Huh, don't know how this could happen. Are the cables connected correctly? Jumper settings on the drives correct? It almost looks like the machine is calling your zip a master and your hard drive a slave...
 

rmrf

Platinum Member
May 14, 2003
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I ended up just unplugging everything except for my hdd and cdrom, then I messed around with the BIOS for a little bit and everything seems to be working.
 

MrChad

Lifer
Aug 22, 2001
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Originally posted by: rmrf
I ended up just unplugging everything except for my hdd and cdrom, then I messed around with the BIOS for a little bit and everything seems to be working.

XP Setup has some strange behaviors when assigning drive letters. I usually do the same thing you did: disconnect any IDE devices except for my target install drive and my CD-ROM drive, run XP setup, then reconnect the drives.
 

spyordie007

Diamond Member
May 28, 2001
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Originally posted by: MrChad
Originally posted by: rmrf
I ended up just unplugging everything except for my hdd and cdrom, then I messed around with the BIOS for a little bit and everything seems to be working.

XP Setup has some strange behaviors when assigning drive letters. I usually do the same thing you did: disconnect any IDE devices except for my target install drive and my CD-ROM drive, run XP setup, then reconnect the drives.
It's not strange behaviors per-se. Windows doesnt care what drive letters are assigned to anything (and you can reassign all but the system drive with the disk management snap-in), the drive letters are there mostly for legacy support (applications that require their presence).

The icon display is a little odd, but I dont think it in-and-of itself is a good indicator as to if you've messed up the installation or not.

My big question is why on earth did you install your OS with your CPU OC'd?
 

jfunk

Golden Member
Oct 16, 2000
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It's not really "weird", it's just that if you didn't have a partitioned drive in there, it already assigned drive letters to the other things before you created it.

XP just doesn't have the "attachment" to the letter C that most users seem to have developed over the years. It doesn't matter what letter it is.

What do you mean by the icons in your my computer display. Have you tried switching to different views to see if they look more familiar to you?

Not be able to run the setup from the CD wouldn't have anything to do with a botched install. More likely a bad disc or drive problem (drive prob not likely since you read the rest of the disc to do manual installs).


j