Windows installs to F: drive?

As a PC tech, I’m kind of embarrassed to post this question, but I’m clueless on this one.

I had been previously using Windows 2000 pretty much since it came out. I never upgraded to XP, since I had a sound card that didn’t have XP drivers.

Well, my sound card crapped out on me, so I bought an Audigy and a copy of XP Pro.

I have six partitions on three physical drives. My boot partition is 30GB, and is the first partition on the primary master. It’s always been C:.

However, when I booted from the XP CD to format that partition, XP identified the partition as F:!

I went ahead and installed it anyway, but ran into some post-install problems. XP refused to access one of my drives, and insisted that the filesystem was RAW, and that I could not access it. It’s actally NTFS, and Windows 2000 knows it. I have no idea why XP can’t figure that out.

Anyway, I need that drive, so I decided to reformat again, and go back to Windows 2000 until I can get that problem sorted out. When I did so, however, Windows 2000 also decided that F: was my main partition, and, like XP, it installed all of my system files onto it!

I’m thinking about going into the Disk Management console and trying to switch the drive letters, but I don’t know if that’s a viable option. I’d hate to have to install operating systems three times in one day!

Any suggestions?

I don’t think the file system problems are related to being installed with the drive letter F, because I’ve done numerous (re)installs, and the XP installer has always seemed to choose the next letter on from any partition being retained. The highest I recall having as the system partition was I: (IIRC it skipped a letter for each Linux partition it couldn’t identify), but I’m currently mundane and just on D:.

Hmm…

I have four physical hard drives, five logical drives (the smallest hard drive, the 40 gig, is the primary master and partitioned roughly in half to dual-boot WinXP and Win98 and only the system files are on that hard drive), and because Win98SE is less flexible and has to be installed first, it gets what it designates as the C drive. WinXP is on the E drive, the other IDEE drive is D, and the SATA drives are J and K. (The optical drives–secondary master and slave–and image drives take up F to I.)

Except for the problem with not reading one of the drives, does it matter that XP is defaulting to F for the system files?

Are you aware of the confusing terminogy in Windows, where “Boot partition” does not mean the partition from which the PC boots. That is called the System Partition (the one on which things such as NTLDR reside). What is called the Boot Partition is the one where you find \WINDOWS or \WINNT or whatever, and it doesn’t have to be the same partition. Really, the names should be the other way round.

Anyway, are you sure that what you want to call C: is the active primary partition on the first disk?

What are the C, D and E drives then? My guess is that they are drives connected through USB, like a card reader or an external hard drive.

The solution is to disconnect those and make a new XP installation.

F: is listed as “Boot” in Disk Management. The unbootable C: (second partition on the same drive) is listed as “System.”

D and E (the other two physical drives) are not USB (all of my drives are IDE) and are working as they normally do.

Yeah, but which ones are primary partitions? I suspect that the first partition is an extended partition. The setup CDs now nothing of any drive letters you may have assigned in Windows, and instead use the standard enumeration order of primary partitions on each drive followed by any logical partitions, which may be different to what you’re expecting.

Hmm. F: is listed as a logical drive (not an extended partition), while C: is listed as a primary partition.

I didn’t change anything since the last time I installed Windows, and everything went off without a hitch then.

Though I have no idea how those designations changed, I suspect that I’ve found my culprit. Thanks, Usram.

The problem is not solved. I used Partition Magic to change the partition to primary, but when I rebooted and reinstalled Windows for the third time today, it somehow reverted back to a logical drive and installed itself on F: again! WTF?

Any ideas?

Put me in for a second of Dog80’s suggestion. If you must have C: at the primary/boot/system partition unplug ALL the other drives and load XP. Once XP is all settled in, shut down and reinstall the other drives. I would have a hard time imagining another drive could hijack C: after that. IIRC it is not possible to reassign drive letters for what XP percieves to be the system partition. Everything else is fair game.

I tried that, but unfortunately, both F: and C: are on the same drive, so it didn’t work.

I fixed my problem, though. I made C: a logical partition and F: a primary partition. No idea why, but somehow that process took Partition Magic 8 hours. Anyway, it finally finished, C: was back where it belonged, and I’m up and running again.

Thanks for the ideas, everyone.