He-heh, maybe I just tell her it's that funky proprietary HP hardware. If you can't dazz;e them with brilliance, baffle them with BS, eh? :)

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I doubt its done the way HP designed it. Of all the HPs I serviced the boot drive always has been drive c. Who knows she must have done something that forever changed the letter assignments. It's best you leave it as is unless you're willing to bore the aggravations... i_XpUser

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Actually, I'm the one who installed XP. A clean install on a new hdd. Did it last night at her place, then brought it into work to run the updates (she's on a dial-up). I didn't notice anything amiss in the partitioning and formatting of the drive, and only noted the drive assignment this a.m.

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Half of my thoughts says do it over and the other half says What for its not his machine.... so the question is did you use HP recovery CD's ? i_XpUser

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Nope, didn't use any recovery CD's. Those funky folks at HP didn't give her any, just a partition on the old hdd and some program to burn the recovery CD's from there. Doesn't do you much good if you don't burn those recovery CD's before you lose the old hdd. HP is cheap. But then, they all are now.

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It's true...unfortunately. I gather you used retail XP to install Windows. I am under the impression that you need to get all drivers from HP site, did you? i_XpUser

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Drivers weren't really an issue. I used XP Pro/SP2 and it picked up all the hardware but the sound card and the modem. Besides, a clean install should've picked up the one and only hdd as "C:". Now this is weird: ERD Commander picks up the hdd partition as the C: drive (not I:). I'm going to bag this thing and start from scratch. Could this be the result of the jumper settings on the hdd? The old one was set as 'cable select' so I put the new one in like that. HP does have that proprietary partitioning going on. The old hdd had a FAT32 recovery partition up in front of the NTFS volume. I'm going to play around with it using Bart's PE and ERD, and see what happens. I'll let you know... Grrrr...HP....not the first time...

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I'll be waiting for your followup :-) I'm sure others feel the same way too... if on the other hands you end up with another snafu, be glad it aint your baby :-) i_XpUser

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Do you by chance have the HDD plugged into the Secondary instead of the primary channel? Bob If you wake up to see the day - it can't be that bad.

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If you are going to do a Reinstall anyway, then be sure to remove the Card Reader and then install... I had the same problem, with a Zip Drive though... Once Removed the Zip drive and installed XP it worked... So hopefully it should work for you too... Nick My PC never Crashes nor does it have Bugs - It just develops random Features at times.

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If she's that picky, remove the card readers and reinstall from scratch. Soylent Green is PEOPLE!!!

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While we're waiting for the followups... let's rehearse... Computers are from Venus, Computers are from Mars i_XpUser

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The hdd is plugged into primary channel. Shows up properly in bios too. Might try disabling the card readers. They are the built-in variety. I already got the fix for another snafu...50' feet of anchor line, won't hold a boat over 18' long. :)

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Here's the fix: I enabled ONLY the primary IDE controller in the BIOS and XP went onto the C: drive (changed the "Local Bus IDE Controller" from "Both" to "Primary" in the BIOS). Now here's the wrinkle: I reinstalled XP, it went in fine, no problemos with the driver and updates, go to double-check the BIOS settings for "Local Bus IDE Controller", abd the setting is on "Both". I didn't do it, I swear. It has a mind of its own, it's an HP!!! Grrrr....

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