[kuratowa]

Our family / work computer crashed earlier today and Windows XP would not successfully boot up after restarting. The computer boot screen would proceed as normally. but the screen would go to black after the initial Windows XP loading screen came up and the process would stop. Subsequent attempts to load in Safe Mode and Restore from last Safe Configuration had the same result.

We went to repair the Windows XP installation from the boot disc and found that the drive letters on the machine had shifted - the drive containing Windows is now indicated as D and the storage hard drive is now labeled as C: The Windows disc reads all partitions on each drive so it does not appear there was a drive failure. I'm hesitant to continue with the repair installation due to the drive letters switching. Could the switched Drive lettering cause Windows to improper load? How do we switch that? Or is this a symptom of a larger problem?

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Hi kuratowa!

That is a strange problem indeed, but not unheard of.

Seems like setup program for Windows is detecting the storage hard drive first and the actual Windows Hard drive second.

Are you comfortable with opening the side panel on your computer? If so, what you want to do is take off the side panel, and then unplug the power and IDE (or Sata) cable from the storage hard drive. Of course do this with the power off. Then turn on the computer, with the XP CD in the drive, and try to do a repair installation again, with it hopefully seeing the hard drive with XP on it as a C drive this time around.

Fenor

[Fenor]

Hi kuratowa!

That is a strange problem indeed, but not unheard of.

Seems like setup program for Windows is detecting the storage hard drive first and the actual Windows Hard drive second.

Are you comfortable with opening the side panel on your computer? If so, what you want to do is take off the side panel, and then unplug the power and IDE (or Sata) cable from the storage hard drive. Of course do this with the power off. Then turn on the computer, with the XP CD in the drive, and try to do a repair installation again, with it hopefully seeing the hard drive with XP on it as a C drive this time around.

Fenor

[kuratowa]

It turns out the Motherboard went dead. It's about a four year old board, and we have anewer system, so it looks like we'll just transfer the content over. Thanks for your help!

[Fenor]

Sorry to hear about the motherboard failing, but at least you were able to figure it out.

Thanks for sharing what happened!