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Boot drive=C but system drive=E? how can i keep both on C

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Cow Hunter

Registered
Joined
Dec 18, 2002
Location
RI, USA
QUESTION: How do install windows on a system and ensure that my SATA raptor hard drive is both the system and boot drive in disk managment, and prevent my SATA drive from being boot and one of my ATA drive being system?

STORY: I seem to have this problem every time i format and i usually end up formating about 4 times in a day before i remember how i fix the problem. i have tried 3 times so far and i am just sick of it. i have tried installing windows on my 74gb raptor SATA drive while my other 3 HDD are unplugged. i checked drive managment and it said C (raptor) was the system drive, but after restarting with the other 3 drives (1 SATA, 2 ATA) it lables the raptor as Boot and one of my ATA drives as the system drive. for those that dont know the effect this have, essentially windows is fully installed on drive C, but if i unplug and remove drive E (drive labled as "system") my computer wont boot. As such i prefer to have boot and system be the same drive so i dont lose everything if drive E were to die or i for some reason wanted to take it out to put into another computer.
 
Preventing this is quite simple once you know what windows is doing. Windows will install the boot files on the first available drive it finds, regardless of whether this has the system files installed there. The workaround is simple. Remove the other drives before loading the OS. This not only makes sure that all system and boot files are located on the same disk, but ensures against installing to the wroung drive,
 
ok i think thats how i usually get around it, i think this time i assumed after assigning my login name and those last steps of windows install that that was the first boot and so i installed the other drives before booting windows fully the first time.
 
nope, failed. installed windows, rebooted twice, and as soon as i installed my other hard drives it made my E drive the system drive again. only thing i can think of is it saw the hidden system files on it and assumed this, guess i will try formatting that drive before i do another reinstall, drive was empty to begin with ( asside from the hidden system files). well if anyone else can think of another step while i sleep on this problem let me know. thanks :)
 
Have you tried setting it to master in partition magic and using boot.ini to load from the correct drive rather then auto search? Infact you could probably just copy it over but the programs already installed will break.
 
fixed it some how, but i dont even remeber exactly what i did. after my 4th reformat it was still screwed up, so i booted off the windows disk again. i got to the screen where you can delete partitions and create new ones, so what i did was i deleted my drive E partition and then rebooted after that step, and some how drive C became the system drive for me again, and all i had to do was use partition magic to repartition drive E again and everything is back to normal almost. somehow i lost icons for "My Computer" and "My Network Places" so they are just the default shortcut icons, semi annoying but i will live with it for now
 
Once you add the PATA back into the loop you have to go into the bios on the a8n-sli. Under Boot order look for HDD boot devices and make sure that the pata did not get pushed to the top. This happens to me sometimes... and is why you are losing your Raptor as main device.

If that doesnt fix it there is something else wrong. I am running 5 SATA drives on 2 controllers and 1 PATA drive and 1 PATA optical on my a8nsli deluxe. My first boot partition is my system partition

My pata drive is labelled "active" but that doesnt effect anything. I can disable it in BIOS and still boot fine.
 
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