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What the hell???????? (Drive letter issue)
I just installed XP Home SP2 on a new computer that I'm building. The
computer is missing a floppy drive. I plan to buy one, but dont have it now. Otherwise, it has a AMD Athlon 64 processor 3200+ 2G of ram. The harddrive is a SATA type, which I had to buy. I have never used a SATA drive before, so this puzzled me. However, I just plugged in the drive, put the XP CD in the CD drive, and let it format the drive and install XP. Besides the SATA Drive, there is a CD drive and a DVD drive. Nothing more...... After XP was installed, I keep getting an error at bootup saying floppy drive error. But pushing F1 loads XP. (Of course there's a floppy drive error, there is NO floppy drive). But the real puzzler came when I went to "My Computer". Listed are Drive C: removable - Drive D: removable - Drive E: removable - Drive F: removable - Drive G: CD Drive - Drive H: DVD Drive - Drive I: Local disk (harddrive). There are NO usb drives plugged in, NOTHING except the harddrive CD drive, and DVD drive. Why are all those removable drives listed? Why is the harddrive on I: and not on C:? This has got to be the weirdest thing I've ever seen...... NOTE: I can reinstall XP if necessary. I actually only installed it because I wanted to test the SATA drive I just bought. But I'd leave it installed, if the drive letters were correct....... I let the install format to NTFS, using the entire 500G drive as one partition. I really wanted to partition it to at least 3 partitions, but I was not sure how to do this during the XP install. I figured I'd just reinstall after using Partition Magic to modify it and make more partitions. Normally, I use a dos floppy and run Fdisk to preformat drives, but I dont have a floppy drive, and also understand that Dos can not access Sata drives directly. (Plus if I'm nto mistaken, Fdisk cant access such a large drive anyhow!). How the hell can the ONLY harddrive be accessed as drive I:? I didn't think that was possible. I thought the boot partition was always Drive C: |
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What the hell???????? (Drive letter issue)
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What the hell???????? (Drive letter issue)
On Thu, 27 Mar 2014 18:17:47 -0400, Paul wrote:
What you are seeing, is the results of a USB "card reader", located on the front panel of the computer. Look under the optical drives for it. It takes small memory cards, such as SD cards out of a digital camera. It was fashionable, to remove floppy drives from computers, and replace the empty "hole" in the chassis, with a USB card reader. The USB card reader, typically takes up four drive letters. Even when no media is present, the drive letters are occupied as removable devices, in the same sense as A: shows up even when no floppy is in the floppy drive. There is some technique for hiding those drive letters, so they don't show, but I'll leave that to your capable search skills :-) If the motherboard in the machine, actually still has a floppy header for the floppy ribbon cable, you can enter the BIOS setup screen, and attempt to track down and disable the floppy. In the hopes that the OS will no longer go looking for it. Note that my older motherboards, don't have this! Only the relatively new one (that does currently have a floppy drive loaded, so I can use my memtest86+ floppy). This motherboard actually has a setting to disable the floppy and make it disappear. http://i61.tinypic.com/2a6tc93.gif (~40KB picture) Paul You're right about the card reader. I forgot that was there. Its for camwer cards and such. But that still dont explain why the HD is not C:. I think I'll just unplug that card reader for now. I dont have the floppy installed as a bootup device. I only set the HD and CD as booting devices. But I'll check on that. In the bios. If that's not enough trouble, I installed XP yesterdayThursday at around 5pm. It's now Friday around 2am. I just turned on the computer and windows will not let me get into it, unless I activate it NOW. Obviously I cant do that, I never even connected a modem to it yet. I only had it turned on once, when I installed it. I know you gave me that code a few weeks ago, to extend the activation, but I cant use it because I cant get in. I guess all I can do is wipe the drive and reinstall. But I'll probably have to get a floppy drive first, so I can use dos to format it clean. Seems the more I mess with XP, the more I hate it. I might just install Win2K and be done with it. There is no reason at all that I should not be able to boot XP whhen I just installed it..... |
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What the hell???????? (Drive letter issue)
On Thu, 27 Mar 2014 15:09:00 -0700, Ghostrider " 00 wrote:
Drives C, D, E and F are probably logical assignments to the slots of the built-in card reader. Drives G and H are obvious. The next drive letter available for installing Win7 would be Drive I. This would also be the boot, or system, partition. (Microsoft always assumes that the hard drive would never be partitioned with logical drives, in which case, it does not matter whether it is Drive C or Drive whatsoever.) I have never installed Windows to any computer with a built-in card reader but perhaps it can be disconnected or disabled prior to the Windows 7 installation. In this instance, Windows 7 would install to the hard drive but it should be assigned as Drive C. GR You're right about the card reader. I forgot that was there. But I'm not installing Windows 7. This is "microsoft.public.windowsxp.general" So obviously I'm installing XP. Which I said more than once in the post. |
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What the hell???????? (Drive letter issue)
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What the hell???????? (Drive letter issue)
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What the hell???????? (Drive letter issue)
On 28 Mar 2014 09:06:46 GMT, Zaky Waky wrote:
wrote in : How the hell can the ONLY harddrive be accessed as drive I:? I didn't think that was possible. I thought the boot partition was always Drive C: You have a bios configuration problem. I ran into the same problem once while doing a rebuild. I fixed it. Not sure how though. I removed the floppy in the bios. Then because of the activation issue, I formatted the drive, and reinstalled XP, but this time I created several partitions on the drive. Now the primary partition is on C: What changed it, is puzzling. I'm wondering if maybe I formatted too large of a drive (the entire 500G). C: is not 116G. I think I also know why the activation issue happened. When I instaled XP, I did not change the date, which was about a month behind. I changed the date later on. I bet that caused that problem. This time I set the date during the install. One thing I'm not happy about now, is that Disk Management will not allow me to format the partitions to Fat32, except for the little one at the end, which is about 32G. The other partitions are 116G 100G 100G and 125G. I read on the web that I cant use Fat32 on any partition over 32G. That's odd, on my Win98 computer, I have soem 40G partitions that are Fat32. I have never used NTFS, and prefer not to. The main reason is so I can access files from DOS, especially if I have a problem where XP wont boot. At least I can still access my data. The other reason is cuz I have a Linux OS program that runs inside of XP, but it wont run on a NTFS drive. I'm now formatting the logical partitions, which is slow. I hope to soon find out of all the partition drive letters are correct, when I reboot. I'm not used to these huge hard drives, and this is the first time I've ever used a SATA drive. (I guess 500G is really not "huge" anymore, but till now, the biggest drive I've used was a 160G IDE. |
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XP have (Drive letter issue)!
wrote in message
... |I just installed XP Home SP2 on a new computer that I'm building. You was Now you building XP Home SP3 | After XP was installed, I keep getting an error at bootup saying floppy | drive error. But pushing F1 loads XP. (Of course there's a floppy | drive error, there is NO floppy drive). Power On Computer or if On Ctrl+Alt+Delete 1,2,3 sec......... Delete [For Dell Bos Setup] F1 [For CompaQ Bos Setup] F2 [For HP Bos Setup] Of course there's a floppy on Yes you know how to put it to Off Just geting there Casey O That a job on it's on | But the real puzzler came when I went to "My Computer". Listed are | Drive C: removable - Drive D: removable - Drive E: removable - Drive F: | removable - Drive G: CD Drive - Drive H: DVD Drive - Drive I: Local disk | (harddrive). | On A XP Pro SP3 [Start] [Settings] [Control Panel] Note: Lift Side Manu Bar Click to Switch to Classic View You can Switch Back when we are Done You see [ Administrative Tools ] Click on it You see [Computer Management] Click on it too Pop-up Computer Management Note: Lift Side Manu Bar Click on (+) Storage Click on Disk Managment Right Click On a Drive The harddrive Tools By Microsoft Good for partitions of a New Add-on harddrive too Have fun youall |
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What the hell???????? (Drive letter issue)
wrote:
On 28 Mar 2014 09:06:46 GMT, Zaky Waky wrote: wrote in : How the hell can the ONLY harddrive be accessed as drive I:? I didn't think that was possible. I thought the boot partition was always Drive C: You have a bios configuration problem. I ran into the same problem once while doing a rebuild. I fixed it. Not sure how though. I removed the floppy in the bios. Then because of the activation issue, I formatted the drive, and reinstalled XP, but this time I created several partitions on the drive. Now the primary partition is on C: What changed it, is puzzling. I'm wondering if maybe I formatted too large of a drive (the entire 500G). C: is not 116G. I think I also know why the activation issue happened. When I instaled XP, I did not change the date, which was about a month behind. I changed the date later on. I bet that caused that problem. This time I set the date during the install. One thing I'm not happy about now, is that Disk Management will not allow me to format the partitions to Fat32, except for the little one at the end, which is about 32G. The other partitions are 116G 100G 100G and 125G. I read on the web that I cant use Fat32 on any partition over 32G. That's odd, on my Win98 computer, I have soem 40G partitions that are Fat32. I have never used NTFS, and prefer not to. The main reason is so I can access files from DOS, especially if I have a problem where XP wont boot. At least I can still access my data. The other reason is cuz I have a Linux OS program that runs inside of XP, but it wont run on a NTFS drive. I'm now formatting the logical partitions, which is slow. I hope to soon find out of all the partition drive letters are correct, when I reboot. I'm not used to these huge hard drives, and this is the first time I've ever used a SATA drive. (I guess 500G is really not "huge" anymore, but till now, the biggest drive I've used was a 160G IDE. You can prepare a partition as NTFS, give it a drive letter etc, then use the Ridgecrop FAT32 formatter, to format it. The Ridgecrop one, does a "quick" format, only writing a new FAT for the partition, rather than formatting every sector. It only takes a second or two, to make a FAT32 partition up to 2TB etc. (Note - this page is SMOTHERED in those stupid, irrelevant, green download buttons. None of those buttons have anything to do with the download!) http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/ind...at32format.htm The actual file is located on a line of text on that page. Click this to get the file. http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/dow...at32format.zip fat32format Q: That's enough to get the job done. On occasion, you may want to adjust the cluster size, but for the most part, I just pass it the drive letter and that's all there is to it. The command (done in Command Prompt) will ask for confirmation. That's how I solve the WinXP FAT32 formatter limitation. It can also be done with GParted, but then, there might be side effects and research to do (alignment). Paul |
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What the hell???????? (Drive letter issue)
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What the hell???????? (Drive letter issue)
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#13
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What the hell???????? (Drive letter issue)
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , writes: [] If that's not enough trouble, I installed XP yesterdayThursday at around 5pm. It's now Friday around 2am. I just turned on the computer and windows will not let me get into it, unless I activate it NOW. Obviously I cant do that, I never even connected a modem to it yet. I only had it turned on once, when I installed it. I know you gave me I know you've sorted it (though possibly only for 30 days or a similar period!), but for completeness: you don't need a MoDem. It can use any network line, but if you start the activation process and it can't detect _any_ MoDem, network connection, or similar, it will offer you the option of activation using the telephone: it tells you a number to call (usually a freephone one - and there are ones for many countries - I think), and you then interact with the remote computer using your telephone's keypad, and typing in things that it reads to you. (I don't know if it has speech recognition if you don't have a touch-tone 'phone. I think there's an option to get through to a real human anyway - that's for when the automatic mechanism fails, so you can try to convince them you're not using a version/copy that's already been used - though I _presume_ that'll not last for ever.) [] use dos to format it clean. Seems the more I mess with XP, the more I hate it. I might just install Win2K and be done with it. There is no You won't believe us at the moment, but you'll grow to like XP as much as you do '98. (Not _more_: both have their shortcomings, '98 being - among other things - limited USB support and software, like browsers that can hack modern websites, won't run on it; XP some of the more nannyish aspects, though you can tame most of those.) Yes, agreed. The sooo limited USB support in W98, plus (the occasional) running out of heap resources, and the more frequent blue screens, while experimenting with the system. In all fairness, I should say it took me awhile, but I'm now converted. :-) (However, that's as far as I'm willing to go for the foreseeable future). I do occasionally miss the DOS booting option, however. But dispense with Windows file Search, and replace it with Agent Ransack (free) or its big brother FileLocator pro (slight cost), etc. |
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