Lee B

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

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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.

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

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.