Back in the day, MS-DOS . . . I did this too. Within the BIOS setup there SHOULD be an option to set the boot drive and several other options. I kinda remember having to set the "type" as being 17 or 19 too. This WAS 20 years back!

Kelly Chien and others will wake up shortly!

Tell us how you get on? - G

I am not a guru either. But I have built a few computers. I don't know how many drives you have on the machine. Would it be too much to disconnect them , make sure you have a good battery on the mother board (thats the only thing that comes to mind for the drive mixup) , boot up with the operating system cd, configure the bios. I would think from there you can start up in safe mode and fix the registry.

The only other way I see is to rig the drive to a functioning computer access the drive from there to fix your problem. I have done this in the past, but not with windowsPE. There's my 2 cents for what it's worth

There is one drive...I've disconnected all the others so that in the reg, I can only see the one drive.
It's not configurable thru the bios, believe me...I've tried. It sees the drive, but once it reaches the blue windows screen that indicates it's opening, it just sits there, but it's not locked up. Cursor is active, just can't get it to complete it's boot cycle.

I'll get my son and his teachers on this one a hopefully get back to you ...

I don't really know about this situation, but did you try pounding the F8 key as it boots to try to get into Safe mode? Worth a shot.

Editing the registry is always dangerous. Not sure I would have tried that.

Ummm. Not sure about this one, but seems to me there is backup copy of the reg that gets saved when it is modified. I think you can boot into either DOS mode or Safe mode and recover it. Maybe some googling will give details.

Don't know if this is close but:


or maybe


dunno, just trying.

Have you tried fixing the Master Boot Record?

1 Restart the PC with the ORIGINAL windows disk in a CD Drive.
2 Make sure that the BIOS is set to boot from a CD ROM BEFORE booting from a hard drive.
3 When the PC starts it will try to boot from the CDROM - confirm that you want this by pressing any key on the keyboard.
4 The PC will start a reinstall of Windows, but will give you the option to open the Recovery Console - accept this option
5 Enter the admin password (if you have one)
6 Type FIXMBR

There is, I think, also a FIXBOOT.

Good luck

Worley

if that doesn't work, put in a seperate clean HD. Install Linux. install it to the seperate HD. It should read the wnidows partitation no problem. Does for me. Then if you put a third drive in there, you can copy all data from "bad" drive to "good" drive with "linux" drive. I've done it before (I keep a copy of linux on my C at all time. Duel boot)

First thing I would try would be the "Last Known Good" feature. Restart the PC, and press F8 repeatedly during boot up and you should be presented with a menu from which you can select a variety of boot options, one of which will be "Last Known Good Configuration". Choose that option and you may be lucky.

If that doesn't work, the my next step would be to try the recovery console. Put the Windows installation CD in the drive and restart the PC to boot from the CD. When the Welcome screen appears press R to start the Recovery Console. Once you get the Recovery Console's prompt you can type Help and press enter to get a list of the commands provided in the Recovery Console. If you are lucky then perhaps one or more of the commands bootcfg, fixboot, or fixmbr will allow you to rescue the situation.

If that didn't work then I would first make a copy of the data on the hard disk (I would make a Ghost image, but there are other ways) and then try a Repair Intallation of Windows. To do this, boot from the Windows installation CD and choose suitable options to install Windows over the top of the existing installation. At the point where the installation is about to begin there should be an option to press R to do a Repair Installation. This will attempt to repair the existing installation of Windows (preserving all applications, etc) rather than to replace it with a fresh installation. If you are lucky you will end up with a repaired version of Windows that can boot again.

Best of luck

Mark

The problem is possibly that the XP registry which holds all the drive information is still pointing to 'H:' thus it can't find the right files or drive.

It won't accept your password probably because the drive now has a different security identifier to the one you originally installed to.

There are a number of things that could be tried:

From the XP install CD choose the install option (the one after the recovery console) and choose the REPAIR option, this will wipe out the the OS files and re-install them including updating the registry - you will not lose access to your installed programs, apart from the fact you'll probably need to go through registry and change all instances of 'H' to 'C'.

This article from the Microsoft Knowledge base may help as well.

John

Worley wrote exactly what I was going to suggest. It can do a lot of repair by itself when started that way. One last option is to select install Windows and when it asks if you want to repair the installation that it finds, select yes. That is easier than using the repair console.

KK

To add to what kkolbo says... the Repair option is not the first Repair Option that Windows presents to you. Check this link from Information Week - a non-destructive repair: http://tinyurl.com/gn3js

It's helped me out a couple of times.

Worley

..I've actually been thinking a virus is out there, yet to be identified, that's corrupting the boot sector on system drives, as I've had 2 PC's within a month, suffer from what Spot described, although I have'nt changed any drive letter's... & I've went years without an issue like this.. & yes, they were web connected...

& I think alot of off the shelf PC's don't come anymore with a CD install disk anymore, my HP didn't...

..any chance that a virus may be at work here?....

"Short of putting in a new drive, transferring old data from the original drive"

Yank the drive with the data you need, hook up to another PC on a secondary interface and save the data you need.

XP likes to install on drives other than C:, unless you really know what you're doing (kind of like me sometimes).

After you've saved your data, then it won't be as urgent or critical to get the machine back the way it was.

And don't change that key in the registry again!

How did it go SPOT?

Your default boot disk is not being found. All you need is to get your 3 boot files (Boot.ini, Ntdetect.com, and Ntldr) back on the first disk that Windows looks at during boot. This could even be a floppy or USB disk. You can resolve this in a few ways.

1) Boot to your Windows install CD, run a repair.

2) Download a DOS boot floppy disk from bootdisk.com or somwhere.
2a, boot to your floppy.
2b, copy the boot files from whichever hard drive has them (Boot.ini, Ntdetect.com, and Ntldr).
2c, file copy those files to the drive that windows is actually trying to boot from.
2d, if that is not working, then check the boot.ini file. You may need to point to a different disk or partition depending on what you changed to start this problem in the first place.
You can also copy those 3 files to a USB disk or whatever, Windows just needs to find them on any device in order to boot to the disk with the Windows system files.

3) Check your bios to see which disk is first in the boot order. You might be able to skip all of the above by simply changing which disk is set to boot from at start up.

If you find yourself needing to edit the boot.ini, you may have to test it a couple times until you select the correct drive & partition numbers. Look at your boot.ini on another computer to help you figure it out. You can even copy those three files from another coputer to a floppy or usb disk to your problem computer. it's just that you have to have the correct config in the ini file.