I was trying to make a new hdd bootable for a friend of mine, and now my hard drive is set to D: instead of C: and it won't boot, frozen at blue windows xp screen...any ideas?

10/30/2006 12:18:55 PM

format c:

10/30/2006 12:55:42 PM

seriously...is there no better way?

10/30/2006 12:58:11 PM

Describe in detail what you did for the first part, the "make anew hdd bootable for a friend of mine". We can't dish out solutions without more information on what caused the problem.

10/30/2006 2:00:39 PM

is your drive the only one you have plugged into the computer?

is the jumper set correct (if you have one)

is the drive plugged into the proper cable?


try to give us some more details and we can get you straight

10/30/2006 2:03:17 PM

I'm not sure exactly what happened...but now the drive is D:, and all the registry settings are pointing to C:, so it freezes at the light blue windows welcome screen. I basically need to edit the registry but I can't b/c I can't get into windows. Safe mode does not work either...any way to edit the registery outside of windows? I can get the hdd on to my laptop via usb 2.0...

[Edited on October 30, 2006 at 2:06 PM. Reason : ..]

10/30/2006 2:05:27 PM

boot with an xp disk, goto recovery console, use fixboot and fixmbr, set bios boot priority properly

10/30/2006 2:12:00 PM

I did all of this stuff..it's still D:...

10/30/2006 2:15:32 PM

i don't think renaming the letter in disk management will work for your primary drive but you can try

10/30/2006 2:27:59 PM

Ya...I can't get into windows...but you can't remap the boot drive anyway...

10/30/2006 2:46:56 PM

Quote :

"Describe in detail what you did for the first part, the "make anew hdd bootable for a friend of mine". "

10/30/2006 3:19:52 PM

I'm not sure exactly what you did to screw it up, but what about this:
Install Windows as B: on a different HDD.
Add this "D:" disk as a slave drive.
Change it from D: to C: in Disk Manager.
Remove the B: drive and set this one as the Master.

[Edited on October 30, 2006 at 3:22 PM. Reason : s]

10/30/2006 3:22:35 PM

you could boot to a windows cd, and run the repair operation.
might be the easiest.

you could also download one of these
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=SUNA,SUNA:2006-25,SUNA:en&pwst=1&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=hiren%27s+boot+cd&spell=1

i know there are multiple utilities on there.

Quote :

"is your drive the only one you have plugged into the computer? is the jumper set correct (if you have one) is the drive plugged into the proper cable?"

if you want some accurate help answer the above questions, then give us more details like what type of hard drive(s) you're using, what interface, how theyre plugged in, what kind of pc this is etc

10/30/2006 3:23:53 PM

If my guess is correct, the boot partition on your system got messed up, and Windows is having difficulty recognizing drive letters. You can probably fix this by correctly marking your partitions using GParted LiveCD. However, given you "arent' sure" what happened, dunno if you wanna go this route ... could lose everything.

Best suggestion would be to get an external USB case, plug this into another system, and see what the other system is reading it as (i.e. Is Windows on the "c" part of it or the "d" part of it).

10/30/2006 3:25:05 PM

make sure it's plugged in as Primary Master and the jumpers are properly set.

10/30/2006 4:44:56 PM

make sure your boot.ini is pointing to the correct drive.

10/30/2006 5:46:55 PM

when you do this make sure there is no memory card readers plugged in (like SD, xD, CF, or Memory Sticks). A lot of times the mobo will recognize these card readers as C: and then put the hard drive at a later letter. So basically, try again and unplug any memory reading device.

10/30/2006 5:48:04 PM