New XP Install / Wrong Drive.

mkoersvelt

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Joined

Mar 16, 2003

Location

Winnipeg,Canada (EH!)

• Dec 18, 2008

• #1

I have an old rig that needed a fresh install of XP.
It has 2 drives. One is partition into 4 c/d/e/f.
The other is a slave called I:
XP installed itself on I. The boot seq. is CD / C/ A/.
I is the slave. Why would it place itself there??
I wanted it on C:. Was going to let the disk XP reformat the C: and do a fresh install.
So now I have the old XP Pro on C: / which I don't want.
The new XP Home on I??

 

schnikies79

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Joined

Jul 10, 2004

• Dec 18, 2008

• #2

I'm not sure why windows does this, but it does.

Best solution I've found is to unplug the non-primary drives and then install windows. Plug them back in after it's installed. Windows can only install to the correct hard drive if that is the only one it can see.

 

OP

mkoersvelt

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Joined

Mar 16, 2003

Location

Winnipeg,Canada (EH!)

• Dec 19, 2008

• Thread Starter
• #3

XP

Makes sense too me!
I'll unplug the slave drive.
I've enver seen that happen before? The I: slave is at the back of the sequence. Windows loads it there?? Very odd?

 

OP

mkoersvelt

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Joined

Mar 16, 2003

Location

Winnipeg,Canada (EH!)

• Dec 19, 2008

• Thread Starter
• #4

XP

Makes sense too me!
I'll unplug the slave drive.
I've enver seen that happen before? The I: slave is at the back of the sequence. Windows loads it there?? Very odd?

 

ziggo0

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Joined

Apr 27, 2004

• Dec 19, 2008

• #5

This used to happen to me all the time when I somehow made my storage drive a primary drive...after getting my boot sequence sorted out and the drive just formatted as a drive, it's never happened again. However, If your going from XP to Vista or Vista to XP...it will really screw your drive lettering around if you have multiple partitions on 1 drive.

 

redduc900

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Dec 17, 2000

Location

Portland, OR

• Dec 19, 2008

• #6

There's no reason that I've ever found to actually unplug a HDD(s), in order to install the OS to a particular partition / drive. If anything, the drive(s) can be disabled in the BIOS so that Windows Setup doesn't see them. Like ziggo0 mentioned, all you should normally have to do is make sure the boot order and the drive sequence is correct.

 

Twigglish

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Joined

Jul 23, 2007

Location

Clarksville, TN

• Dec 19, 2008

• #7

I had 120GB of stuff deleted because Windows installed itself to the wrong drive one time.

 

OP

mkoersvelt

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Joined

Mar 16, 2003

Location

Winnipeg,Canada (EH!)

• Dec 19, 2008

• Thread Starter
• #8

Twigglish said:

I had 120GB of stuff deleted because Windows installed itself to the wrong drive one time.

Click to expand...

Now that's brutal!!
I unplugged the drive and it worked.
C: came up and away we went.
Thanks guys!!!

 

schnikies79

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Joined

Jul 10, 2004

• Dec 19, 2008

• #9

redduc900 said:

There's no reason that I've ever found to actually unplug a HDD(s), in order to install the OS to a particular partition / drive. If anything, the drive(s) can be disabled in the BIOS so that Windows Setup doesn't see them. Like ziggo0 mentioned, all you should normally have to do is make sure the boot order and the drive sequence is correct.

Click to expand...

Yes there are ways to get around it, but like the above post, I've lost data because everything wasn't exactly right.

Unplugging the drive is a fail-safe way.