Hello All:

Well once again the slightest lapse in knowledge will mess you up big time!

I just did an OS reinstall of Windows XP on a newer Dell XPS 400.  I've done a ton of XP reinstalls on Dell.

What I didn't know is when you have a newer system with card readers, you have to go into the bios and disable the card readers before you install the OS or all the drive letters get all screwed up.

I ended up with the card readers being C,D,E, & F, the DVD drive being G, and the hard drive being H.

I need opinions on what would happen if I used Ghost to image the H partition, repartition and reformat the drive, and copy the image back over onto the C partition?

I'm thinking this will not work because in the registry it will have a bunch of references to the "H" drive but will be trying to operate on "C" ?

I'm leaning towards reinstalling the whole thing again correctly on C...

Thank You,

Lee B.

@ Lee B


Quote:

I need opinions on what would happen if I used Ghost to image the H partition, repartition and reformat the drive, and copy the image back over onto the C partition? I'm thinking this will not work because in the registry it will have a bunch of references to the "H" drive but will be trying to operate on "C" ?

I think that will indeed be the problem--the registry will still be referencing the H: drive and it will no longer exist.


Quote:

What I didn't know is when you have a newer system with card readers, you have to go into the bios and disable the card readers before you install the OS or all the drive letters get all screwed up. I ended up with the card readers being C,D,E, & F, the DVD drive being G, and the hard drive being H.

I'm curious--did you install WinXP manually?  Did the installation program not list all those *used* drive letters as not available to you?  Didn't the installation summarize that it would be installing to the *H:* drive before you committed to that install?

I've never had that issue, so I don't know what happens when you install WinXP under those circumstances.

Lee B wrote on Jul 13^th, 2009 at 11:08am:

I'm thinking this will not work because in the registry it will have a bunch of references to the "H" drive but will be trying to operate on "C" ? I'm leaning towards reinstalling the whole thing again correctly on C...

Lee B,

I'm with you.

I deliberately did this recently. Installed WinXP to a non C: partition and then I deleted all other partitions. It was weird having a computer without a C: drive anywhere. Just for amusement.

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/notes.htm#note08

I have tried to fix this before.  tried hard.  many times.  no go.

You could try restoring image to C drive, and then boot to Windows install CD, choose "Repair using Recovery Console," and run Fixmbr, Fixboot and Bootcfg from there.  It may or may not work as I've not tried it, but it wouldn't take much time to try it.

I had a similar circumstance where I had an add on card reader, but I averted the problem by unplugging the add on until Windows was installed.  You might have to do a new install on the C drive if the Recovery Console approach fails to work.

As explained in the link to my webpage that Brian provided, the issue is which drive or partition XP-Setup sees as "C".  If you have an existing active primary partition on the hard disk, it should normally be designated by Setup as C.  That will not be the case if your BIOS is set to boot some other visible drive first (usb drives, zip drives, card readers), or if the hard disk has no primary partitions.  (This commonly occurs when installing to a brand new hard disk because it is unpartitioned.)

Drive letters are always assigned anew when the CD boots, so if you let Setup create the partition, it may have already given something else the "C" letter, and the new partition Setup creates will get some other letter.  You should not let Setup continue at that point or that other letter will be locked into the new installation's registry.

To prevent this from happening, you can either temporarily disconnect the card reader until XP is installed, or you can reboot after Setup creates the partition.  Rebooting causes WinPE to rescan devices and reassign drive letters, and this time it should find the new primary partition and give that the letter C before the card reader.  Continuing with the XP install will then lock in the correct drive letter.

As for correcting the drive letter after the fact, you would need to at least edit the registry and change all the H: references to C:.  Methods might involve booting from a BartPE CD with appropriate registry tools, or removing the hard disk and mount as secondary in another host system so you can work on it.  Some people have reported good results, but I wouldn't consider it a reliable alternative.  Besides the registry, there can be numerous easy-to-overlook configuration files (ini, dat, cfg, bin, and more) that might contain references that some program or other might use.

Since Lee just installed XP, presumably he hasn't invested a lot of time installing additional programs and data, so it would be much easier, quicker, and more reliable to start over and reinstall.