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Old August 10th, 2017, 05:49 PM
justacruzr2 justacruzr2 is offline
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Question Weird hard drive problem

A little background on my system. I have 4 hard drives attached to my system. All of them are internal. 2 (C: & D: are connected to the primary IDE connector on the motherboard and 2 (E: & F: are connected via a RAID controller card in a PCI slot. A couple weeks back, for some unknown reason, my one hard drives (F: partition table got trashed and I was unable to access it. Because this one has my backups on it and all my music it was imperative to get it working again if for no other reason than to get everything off it. What I did was use Partition Magic to copy the partition table from one of the other drives onto the F: drive. I know this is a little risky but it did work and I got everything off it. I then re-formatted the drive. However, when I re-started XP, the drive letters on 2 of the drives were incorrect. It was calling D: drive (which is connected to the primary IDE connector) the F: drive (which is connected to the RAID controller) and the F: drive...the D: drive. The D: drive is the one that I copied the partition table from. I get it that by doing that I gave the F: drive the personality of the D: drive but I thought formatting would have re-created a new partition table also. When I use a disk editor to look at the partition table, it looks correct and no longer matches the D: drive partition table. However, when XP starts up there is a long pause before I get to the "Welcome" screen and it still assigns D: as F: and F: as D:. I corrected that by going into the registry key HKLM/Local Machine/Mounted Devices and changed the drive letters back to what they should be but it still takes a long pause when starting up (which it never did before this all happened). I also have Win 98 on one of the other drives and Win ME on another and they do not show the drives incorrectly nor do they experience any long pause at startup. Does anyone know what's going on here? My only idea at this point is to move everything off F: again and use Partition Magic to delete and then re-create a new partiton on the F: drive and then re-format it again. Any thoughts? Thanks.
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Old August 29th, 2017, 07:00 PM
Appzalien Appzalien is offline
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Why did you use the registry to correct the drive letters when you could have done it in Administrative tools > Computer management > Disk management. That would have been the way to go. You can always use system restore to go back to a time before the registry change and then do it the proper way. When you change a drive letter you get a warning that changing the drive letters may create problems if a program shortcut points to the wrong place but since your original was C,D and E,F any programs you had installed that were not on C would have pointed to the correct place or drive letter anyway. If your running XP you can also change drive letters as well with a similar warning without editing the registry. But with XP SP3 it's almost imperative you do your system restores from safe mode or they will likely fail. If you don't have easy access to the Admin Tools in XP here are instructions to add it to your start menu:
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/...in-windows-xp/

Last edited by Appzalien; August 29th, 2017 at 07:05 PM.
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