disk setup change

  • Thread starter Thread starter marco
  • Start date Start date
M

marco

I am trying to help out a friend who borugh me in a PC with a strange setup.
Heset it up himself, but does not know what happened.....
This system has 2 SCSI drives.
As a picture is worth a 1000 words, look at this
http://www.network-able.com/drives.jpg

As you can see, the boot drive is D and the system drive is F. There is no C
drive.
Is there some way, without destroying the data on the drive, to change the
system and boot drive to C drive?
Any ideas on what to do to make this a normal setup? (Boot from C, etc.,
without losing everything?)
 
marco said:
I am trying to help out a friend who borugh me in a PC with a strange setup.
Heset it up himself, but does not know what happened.....
This system has 2 SCSI drives.
As a picture is worth a 1000 words, look at this
http://www.network-able.com/drives.jpg

As you can see, the boot drive is D and the system drive is F. There is no C
drive.
Is there some way, without destroying the data on the drive, to change the
system and boot drive to C drive?
Any ideas on what to do to make this a normal setup? (Boot from C, etc.,
without losing everything?)
Click to expand...

It's been some time since working with SCSI drives and setting up systems
to use them. However, the reason why there is no Drive C is that the cdrom
used to install Windows XP was probably an IDE-ATAPI one and it was set up
in the computer's bios as the boot drive. This made it Drive C, with XP
being installed into Drive D. And Drive D cannot be converted to Drive C.

One alternative would be to backup all of the data, etc., files that are
present and do a clean install to clean hard drives. The setup would have
to use the floppy diskettes instead of booting from the cdrom. The driver
files for the SCSI host adapter should also be on a separate floppy. Set
up the SCSI drives by assigning ID 0 to the primary drive and ID 1 to
the slave drive. In bios setup, make sure that the cdrom is not the boot
drive and that starting or booting from a SCSI drive is enabled. Read the
SCSI host adapter manual or instructions to make sure that it, too, is
set up properly. (There could be variations to this, depending on the make
of the bios and available options. Check with the manuals.)

At the appropriate time early in the Windows installation, the SCSI drivers
need to be loaded, followed by the normal installation routine of fdisking
the hard drive(s), formatting, etc.

It's been a long time. Read up on how to do a SCSI installation. This was
written from memory.
 
You press F6 early in the winxp installation process to install third party
drivers from floppy

I'd be a little surprised if by using the cd drive to boot from, the SCSI
boot drive became D, it certainly doesnt in a sata drive, the installation
of which follows the same principle, even if using a sata card.
 
marco said:
I am trying to help out a friend who borugh me in a PC with a strange setup.
Heset it up himself, but does not know what happened.....
This system has 2 SCSI drives.
As a picture is worth a 1000 words, look at this
http://www.network-able.com/drives.jpg

As you can see, the boot drive is D and the system drive is F. There is no C
drive.
Is there some way, without destroying the data on the drive, to change the
system and boot drive to C drive?
Any ideas on what to do to make this a normal setup? (Boot from C, etc.,
without losing everything?)
Click to expand...


Is you're friend having software issues? If not I wouldn't worry about
it. In fact I think its kind of neat, the perfect test bed for poorly
written software.

John
 
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