Linea Recta wrote:
I removed a broken hard drive (which was Window system drive) from (some
one's older computer) and built in a working drive.
Configured all in BIOS, OK so far.
Now I partitioned & formatted the "new" drive and installed Windows XP
(SP3), taking care to choose the swapped drive label as the Windows
partition, not to overwrite the other existent HD.
After installation Windows seems to reside on the D: instead of C:.

What the .....*%%&$ ?!

What mistake can I have made? And how can I fix this situation?

In Disk Management, what comes before it ?

The thing is, you might have manually partitioned the drive,
put multiple partitions, then installed to the second partition,
and that ends up as D:.

I've managed to do that, by doing a "hard drive install", copying
the CD into one partition, and trying to install into another
partition. By accident, I put the partitions in the wrong order
(as seen in the partition table).

So it's a matter of you looking at the available storage
devices, and discovering "what came before" the partition
in question, and solving it before reinstalling. It's possible
to "hide" a partition.

You can review the partitions with this, if you need more inspiration.
(If you run this in Windows 7, you need to "Run as Administrator" or
you'll get "error 5". Fewer problems expected with WinXP.)

ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/englis...s/PTEDIT32.zip

That will show you the partition table, which slots are occupied in
the partition table, and so on.

You can compare and correlate the info from PTEDIT32 to Disk Management,
and see things you might otherwise miss.

Paul