[Arin]

I built one of those silly shuttle computers for my cousin. There is no floppy drive and I am connecting the hardrive via SATA. The mouse and keyboard are bluetooth.

First problem upon boot is that the mouse and keyboard are bluetooth so I have to get replacements for installing everything. Kind of a pain in the ass.

Second problem is that windows xp w/ sp2 doesnt reconize the SATA drivers so I have to take the case off, get a haggard old floppy drive from some where on campus and find a floppy that keeps failing. Huge pain in the ass. The last several computers I've built dont even need me to install drivers for the SATA to use it.

Anyways, I installed windows, which by the way kept stalling out on me. I got the mouse and keyboard all installed. Then I went to do the motherboard drivers but they would not install. Turns out, windows installed itsself on drive F!

I cant change it to C since its the boot drive, so that means I have to reformat again?!! and how the hell am I going to make it drive C? Do I just have to install and HOPE it installs as drive c?


This is such a serious pain in the ass.
Is there any way to change it to drive letter C w/o reformatting?

[GTwannabe]

When you reinstall windows, make sure no other hard drives are connected.

[Arin]

Thats part of the problem.
1 hardrive, and a dvd drive.
what gives?

[jmmijo]

Here is what you need to do to verify the SATA HD issue, is the motherboard an Intel chipset board or does it have a Via/SiS chipset ?!?

If it's the latter then I'm afraid you have to have a floppy connected to do the F6 install. Sometimes if you set the IDE mode to Enhanced instead of Auto the SATA drive will be mapped into the Primary MAS/SLA position so that you do not have to load any floppy disk drivers, however in my experience this isn't always the case.

Also note that if there is any multi-card readers installed in this cube, then you'll need to disable the onboard USB until you re-install the OS. This should allow the OS to re-assign the proper drive letters. Once the OS is installed then you should be able to enable the USB once more.

I'm not sure if having the Bluetooth enabled is not also causing the drive letter rearrangment or not, however I would dsiable it as well and use a PS2 KB/Mouse instead.

[Arin]

Hopefully this works out. No time to do it today so I'll take a stab at it tomorrow
thanks.

[Ima]

This happened to me. More than once. As a matter of fact, my system is runnig from F as we speak.

When it meant something to me, I ghosted the F to CD using a ghost boot floppy with CD support. I detached the C:drive, delparted the F, and ghosted it back. Then I booted from the XP CD and did a repair install. Voila.

[Arin]

So nothing else can be done?

[Wilhelmus]

Well, you can try this:

1) Get somewhere Windows 98 boot diskette (bootdisk.com).
2) Then boot with it.
3) Execute at command prompt: fdisk /mbr.
4) Try boot into Windows.

This should force Windows to 'forget' drive assignments.

No promises, though.

<edit>
Oh, and you MUST use Windows 98 fdisk.
Windows XP recovery console's fixmbr does not work.
</edit>

[Arin]

I'll give it a shot when I get the new floppy up here.
thanks.