[CuChulainn]

Hi

I have a new'ish PC with Vista 32.

The main drive(s) is two 250Gb drive configured as one 500Gb RAID drive, which was identified as the C drive and included the windows install.

When an additional drive was installed the computer of its own volition labeled it the B drive.

The computer now fails to boot up windows and says it cannot find the windows installation.

I have determined that the computer seems to have renamed the previous B drive as the C drive and the previous C drive as the D drive. (All my previous data seems to be there and intact from what I can tell)


Could this be why the computer cant find the windows as it is now looking in the wrong place...

I have read that computers 'reserve' the A and B drive designations for floppy drives. Did the computer 'realize' that it had incorrectly designated a hard drive as B and in correcting this screwed things up?

How can I correct this? I do want to avoid a fresh install as all my data seems to be intact and it is just a case of a shifted drive designation.

Help please...

C-

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The twin RAID hard drives (the ones with the windows VISTA 32 installed) are Western Digital WD2500KS if it helps. C-

[CuChulainn]

The twin RAID hard drives (the ones with the windows VISTA 32 installed) are Western Digital WD2500KS if it helps. C-

[Neil Jones]

The computer doesn't label any drives any letter whatsoever. It just sees two hard drives, configured in a fashion to appear as one, a floppy drive if present and a CD drive or two.
The convention of Drive A, B and C is a software thing. Windows has always called them Drive A, B and C. Drives A and B under Microsoft operating systems are reserved for floppy drives, Drive C is typically a hard drive and drives D through to Z can be anything from other hard drives to CD units to mapped network drives.

as a quick solution, try unplugging the new drive and see what happens.

[CuChulainn]

Thanks Neil.

I removed the new drive and although it didnt boot up it did find a windows installation to repair using the installation disc (it didnt before) - on what was now named as before the C drive. It repaired OK.

Now I just have to work out how to get the new drive back in and happily labelled a D drive.

THANK YOU


C-











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[Neil Jones]

Sounds like the machine is trying to boot off the new drive and of course failing miserably. Was this second drive from another computer per chance?
Go into the BIOS and look for the boot order, change it so as not to try and boot off the second drive but only the RAID setup.