thanks Sharon ... I ran the repair as you advised and
looged on successfully. However the hard drive is now
titled D instead of C. I had to reinstall office but it
would work as it points to C by default when my hard drive
is now named D. Any ideas on how to get XP to see it as
the C drive. I tried wiping the CMOS and loading the
defaults but to no avail.
Conor, you're welcome. Did you start a new thread? It's easier if you keep
everything in the same thread so that all of the information about your
situation is "tied" together. Luckily, I hadn't purged my newsreader yet
and since this group isn't high volume, I was able to find the old one:
I'm glad you were able to get XP running again on the original system.
You sound surprised that it is now D:... Tell me if I got any of this
wrong:
You had XP installed (on C:?) on system #1.
You took this hard drive out and moved it to system #2.
(You never really mention what went on at #2 other than the fact that #2
also had XP installed on it)
When you put the drive back on system #1, you could not get the drive to
boot and ran a repair install. XP now boots but the drive letter is D:
If your programs give you trouble, can you reinstall them to the same
folder? Do you have installation media and patches for all of them? If this
is workable, just leave it.
XP relies more heavily on information in boot.ini that looks like this:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)
than it does on drive letters. Program might care though.
The reason I say to leave it alone is because the only way to fix the drive
letter is to reinstall again. If you take this route, be sure you have the
drive jumpered correctly (you did remember to change that again didn't
you?) and, to be on the safe side, disconnect any unnecessary peripheral
drives. Zip drives especially like to grab C: before XP can hand it to the
hard drive.
With a floppy disk, a cdrom drive and a hard drive attached, you can get
the basics going in XP. Then add any extra drives back onto the setup.
