XP HDD switch

  • Thread starter Thread starter MScudmore
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MScudmore

Hello everyone,

About a year ago my older brother wanted to upgrade his
old PC and asked me to give it a try. We bought a new
Motherboard, chipset, RAM, the whole works - including
the upgrade from Win98 to XP Home Edition. On his old
system he only had one HDD that was 6GB, but we bought
him a nice, new 60GB Western Digital HDD. I set the
cables to run the 60GB as primary adn the 6GB as primary
slave, and then did the same in the BIOS.

All has been working great for him until just
recently. IT seems that all of a sudden Windows XP has
decided to switch the drives. Now it's reading the 6GB
as C: and the 60GB as D: and needless to say, this caused
him major problem for trying to start up his PC. The
only thing that was on the 6GB drive when this happened
was his wife's thesis paper, but it kept wanting to boot
XP from that drive. He even reinstalled XP but it
defaulted to the 6GB drive and didn't even give him the
option of using the other.

So he did install it onto the 6GB so he could atleast
boot up into the OS, but I was wondering if there was a
way to get XP back to recognizing the BIOS declaration of
the HDDs.

Thanks for taking the time to help,

Michael Scudmore
 
The jumpers are set the same way the BIOS are reading the
drives, the 60GB is set for being primary and the 6GB for
primary slave.

I just talked with my brother again and he said he'd done
something while talking to tech support that had him
remove partitions on one of the drives, but he says he's
not sure which drive it was doing it on. I told him to
use the Western Digital setup diskette to try and re-
partition the 60GB drive, but he was then told that if he
has XP he needs to update the BIOS in order to do
anything. I've tried looking for where to find the
updated EZ-BIOS but have had no luck. And I'm still not
really sure how much that would have to do with it, since
the system and BIOS themselves are already currently
reading the drives in the proper order, just XP seems to
want them switched.

Michael Scudmore
 
MScudmore said:
All has been working great for him until just
recently. IT seems that all of a sudden Windows XP has
decided to switch the drives. Now it's reading the 6GB
as C: and the 60GB as D: and needless to say, this caused
him major problem for trying to start up his PC. The
only thing that was on the 6GB drive when this happened
was his wife's thesis paper, but it kept wanting to boot
XP from that drive. He even reinstalled XP but it
defaulted to the 6GB drive and didn't even give him the
option of using the other.

So he did install it onto the 6GB so he could atleast
boot up into the OS, but I was wondering if there was a
way to get XP back to recognizing the BIOS declaration of
the HDDs.
Click to expand...

It *sounds* as if the the jumpers on the cable have gone awry so it is
seeing the 6GB as the master. What I would do is disconnect that drive
for the moment, make sure the 60 is jumpered as master *and* seen as
such by the BIOS and then see if it will still boot up.
 
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