Couple questions

Those are some real PITA questions, Quik. 🙂 Good to see you back.

I won’t get very specific here, since each motherboard/controller works a little bit differently.

Windows will always put it’s boot information (NTLDR- The NT bootloader, boot.ini) on the first accessible partition it can find, regardless of where you install windows, it will do this. (Verified as of XP, though I highly doubt Vista changed this behavior).

I always found the best way to make sure that Windows was installed on the correct drive, was to pull the disks I wasn’t installing on. This insures that the boot information, as well as the OS get on the same disk, and it gets named C. Windows will look at the chain and see disk0 (master) before disk1 (slave), and channel0 before channel1. It will detect one of the two interfaces first–PATA (IDE) or SATA–I don’t know which one, it may be motherboard-dependent, but you will have to account for it. If it detects SATA first, you can override it by NOT having boot information on any partition of your SATA disks, and NOT having an MBR written to the disk.

As for fixing your problem… honestly I don’t know what the heck you did, though I doubt it has anything to do with a modified boot screen. I don’t know why you’d get an error before you do a reset… I suppose the second time it runs, it’s faster because it’s not doing another memory test. I’d try and get your boot information and OS on a single partition, and have it be channel0/disk0, since this alone may solve other problems.

Also.. having windows installed at any drive other than C always messed things up for me on the application level, I would probably recommended reinstalling if it isn’t too much hassle.

What also may help, is booting to recovery mode off the Windows CD and using the ‘fixboot’ and ‘fixmbr’ tools to get your boot information back on the right disk. You may have to wipe the MBR off the ‘old’ first disk to do this properly… so it could be more pain than it is worth.

@Quiksilver 230017 wrote:

The thing is, when I installed Windows it never asked me where I want to install it. It just auto-installed into what is now known as D:.
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Did you install from a retail (XP?) disk? It should give you the option if there is more than one disk that would suffice as an install location… so unless your C: had less than ~2GB of space, it should have given that option. Otherwise, that’s really strange, but this was always one of the more confusing and fickle problems.

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I assume there’s no way to make D: the main drive (C:) other than reinstalling windows. Which might be a viable option as I found out how to salvage information from old hard drives (Safe mode does have features!). I’ll reserve all that for a weekend that I have lots of time on.

If there *was* a way to fix it, you’d end up breaking a ton of software, it wouldn’t be worth the PITA to clean up after that type of change.

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As in this upcoming three day weekend.

o.O I didn’t even know, I guess that’s what I get for going to a school that only has full weeks.

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Good to see you too David, I half figured you’d still be here!

Yeah.. I’ll never really leave.

@Quiksilver 230019 wrote:

I think the problem was that there was a version of Windows on the C: that was newer than the old one on D: so it decided to overwrite that one instead. And since it’s kind of impossible to uninstall windows I just took ownership of everything on C: and deleted the windows files I didn’t need anymore to get myself some storage space.

Sounds like things were kind of screwy from the start. But yeah, deleting the files and possibly removing the MBR is about all you can do for removing Windows, and then taking ownership of the files.

Are C and D seperate disks, or the same disk?

I’d try and pull my data onto whatever drive, pull that drive out, and have only ONE in the computer, on channel0-master of whatever controller you want to use. Then it can’t be installed anywhere but C:. Once this is done, you can probably put disks in on whatever channel and not have a problem. if you do, you’ll need to wipe the MBR off of said disks (I think a win98 disk with fdisk /mbr will work, but there may be a better way).

The main point: install windows on the disk seen as C, that *should* do it. but it should also let you know during install where it wants to put files.

Correct, that is how it SHOULD work. try and put in that bigger drive on a slave channel, it shouldn’t try and boot the (now old, non-working) windows install that way.