Ugh, drive letter woes.

[lozina]

Ihave a system which has a 36 gig SCSI hard drive which I used as primary drive (place where OS installs to) and then later I added a SATA drive (SATA ports are onboard, the SCSI had to come via a PCI card). Now I'm trying to reinstall a fresh copy of XP on the system and when I went into Windows Setup it showed the SATA drive as D: while my SCSI drive as C: (even though at the time windows was installed on the SCSI one and it has always been the C: )

anyway, I didnt think much of it and thought it would just be extremely annoying later when I install do have windows on D: but whatever. Now the setup finished its initial phase of formatting the drive and then copying some files but on the first reboot it fails. Says BOOT DISK FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER. Probably because it's looking in the SATA drive not the SCSI one which it just installed to...

When I open BIOB and go into the Hard Drives section of Boot, it shows both my drives and the SCSI one is listed as #1. So WTF is windows keep thinking the SATA is C: and how do I remedy this?

Cliffs:

1. formatted my pc which has a scsi drive and a sata drive
2. installed windows xp to the scsi drive (was given D: in windows setup)
3. now wont reboot anymore- says disk boot failure... probably because its looking in the C: ?

 

[lozina]

Eh guess it's worse than I thought. I cheated and unplugged my SATA drive and I get the same message. Gonna go through the process over again...

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, If I understand you correctly: A drive not called C: would maybe format without the necessary Boot files. Thats Config.Sys, Msdos.Sys and Command.Com in the root of the drive. Don't know what progs you are using but, Win98 boot disk would let you add them by running SYS C: from the boot drive. You could also copy them from the bootdrive. They are in the root, SYSTEM, HIDDEN and READONLY. Win98 or XP should let you do it by setting properties to turn off SHR. Set SHR back on both drives after you get the copies done. Hope this helps a little, Jim

 

[mechBgon]

Or, if you want the SATA drive to be the boot drive, unplug the SCSI drive from its cable for the duration of Windows Setup, and that should get you past it too.

 

[Ausm]

1) I would make sure the Bios is up to date on your Mobo

2)I would only put in the drive you want to boot from then install windows

3)Put in the additional drives after you get Windows updated.

Good Luck,

Ausm