Windows XP Home installed on wrong drive

pintree3 · Joined: Aug 15, 2005 Posts: 6

I had/have 2 physical HDD. My HDD where windows was installed crashed and needed to be replaced.
I don't know what the people at the shop did but when I went home with the new drive and was ready to install Windows, my 2nd drive, with 2 partitions and files in it were labelled C; and D: Windows installion gave me no option but to install Windows XP on the G; Drive. Now I can only boot up with the Windows CD in the DVD drive or it thinks I have no OS.

Is there a safe way of changing the drive letters, so that G, where the OS is, can be changed to C: and vice versa (without having to uninstall anything)? (HDD # 2 where G: is also has H Smile

Also, did this problem of having C; taken, occur because the wiring or jumpers from the HDD's to the motherboard were not set properly? and if yes, is it best I change these first?

P.S. I have partition Magic 8

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1546 Location: Central FL, USA

Back up and start over.

First, to keep things on the proper course, while installing a new OS or wiping an old drive, make sure you have only ONE drive connected, so confusion or accidents don't happen. Then whatever operation you're trying to do can't happen on the wrong drive.

At one point, when XP is installing, it shows you a list of all the drives that it sees and asks you to highlight the drive you want to use and press Enter, or some such.

If Xp installed to the wrong drive, it's only because you let it.

So, if you have more than one drive, disconnect it and try the install again.
You can use PM8 to reformat the partition you're going to install the OS to.
I sort of had to do this yesterday, on a PC where something had happened to the first partition on the main (and only) hard drive.
The Setup program for XP was reporting seeing NO drives or partitions.
PM8 formatted the first partition as NTFS and made it Active. Then the XP setup program saw it, accepted it and started the install.
I had not seen that particular problem before, but PM8 made quick work of it.

Good Luck to you and Happy New Year!

The Doctor Cool

zzron357 · Joined: Oct 14, 2004 Posts: 43

Hi Pintree,
Maybe by now issue is resolved. The new drive was G because C was there already.
Either the drive jumpers are wrong, or the cable is a cable select cable. If this is the case, set both drives to CS (cable select jumpering) and be sure the new drive connects to the last connector on the cable. The cable usually is labeled drive 0 and drive 1 (master and slave) and XP will always call the first partition in the master drive
C:\ (with a few minor exceptions) Or, as drwho07 said, only connect one drive.
If the old drive D:\ is a recovery partition, as done often by Compaq, then the situation changes somewhat, since the recovery partition is really the first partition, and the names have been reversed. Once XP is installed, you can rename partitions from within XP, but getting to C:\ is difficult if not impossible. I use Puppy Linux and Gparted (partition editor) to examine partition structure. This shows when the drives are switched as above. Also to partition and to resize partitions. Your new drive is probably larger than the old -- and you may benefit by having a C and a D on it too.
Puppy Linux can be used to copy files to flash or external drives for back-up -- or burn to cd or dvd. I use it so much that on my own pc's I do a frugal install and add a linux swap partition.
Best wishes, ZZRON

pasquanel · Joined: Jun 20, 2005 Posts: 507 Location: Maine

If you have a new installation of Windows on your G drive reboot the computer and get to the bios screen select "boot" and then "hard drives"
set set your g drive to boot first and the computer will automatically change the drive letter to C Wink

Happy New Year!

tbernstein · Joined: May 16, 2003 Posts: 1576 Location: London

Adding to the above. In a similare situation, I had D: as my Windows drive for a couple of years, after a reinstall.
And the only problem I ever had was when a silly software install programme (or two) insisted on looking for Windows on C: and then throwing a wobbly.