windows XP installs on wrong drive!

[karmapunk21]

Hello! I ran a program recently that i'm pretty sure was a virus because whne i booted my perfectly normal XP (installed on drive C), XP wouldnt boot saying "ntldr is missing." After running the recovery console, i discovered that the hard drives had switched! My media harddrive (which was D) became C and my XP harddrive (which was C) became D!.

SO, i decided to reformat. I put the XP cd, deleted all partitions on both hard drives, created new ntfs partitions, installed normally, booted into windows, and discovered that it installed to the D drive (which used to be the C drive). IN otherwords, it installed on the physical hard drive that i wanted it to, but for some reason that physical hard drive is labelled D. THere are no other windows installations. I'm extremely worried that my system will no longer operate, because i was planning to take out the media hard drive (which is now drive C).

SO uh, if a reformat doesnt resolve this problem (as evidenced above), what does? DO i have to do an fdisk and then reinstall?

 

[Crusty]

Did you mess with your hardware at all, or did you chnage any BIOS settings?

 

[karmapunk21]

nope! no hardware changes since for the past 6 months. and i dont think the cables switched themselves...

 

[JonnyBlaze]

this is what i do when that happens. only have the one drive installed while you install xp. then plug in your other drives.

JB

 

[MrChad]

Originally posted by: JonnyBlaze
this is what i do when that happens. only have the one drive installed while you install xp. then plug in your other drives.

JB

Yep. XP has done this to me countless times. Your best bet is to unplug other hard drives, install XP, the plug the others in.

 

[karmapunk21]

ok i unplugged and i'm formatting and installing now. I'm just curious as to what causes this problem. Did it happen to you, mrchad, out of the blue, or was it because of a proggy or a hardware change or something else?

 

[MrChad]

I think it has to do with the way the XP installation program assigns drive letters to partitions. It happened to me in the following scenarios:

1. I was installing XP onto a 80GB RAID0 partition. A secondary drive was set up as the primary master on my onboard IDE controller (showed up as C: ).
2. I was installing XP on a fresh 80GB hd set as primary master. A secondary drive (already formatted, with data) was set up as the primary slave (showed up as C: ).

 

[karmapunk21]

ok looks like your suggestions worked. THanks a lot!