Missing Disc---Redo Drive Letter Assignments?

Trying to fix daughter's XP machine that's had a long-standing problem. After a bootup, get message "There is no disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive." [NO drive letter or ID is specified] Two "cancels" makes message go away, and all proceeds normally, altho use of AdAware or Spybot totally freezes machine (maybe just a result of the more underlying problem?). Every conceivable boot sequence has been tried.

The odd thing is that the local HD (not partitioned) is assigned as the I drive (thanks to an earlier repairman); there is no C drive. D,E,F,G,H are her CD-R, burner, and apparently remnants of her use of a card reader (maybe she didn't disconnect them properly). Maybe these messages are occuring as she boots thru all those letters to get to I? If she was to try and reassign the I drive to C (via control panel), would a non-recoverable disaster occur?

 

Hi chrisw,

Before doing anything, lets see what the boot.ini looks like:

Right click My Computer > Properties > Advanced tab > Startup and Recovery > Settings > Edit under System Startup. Copy the boot.ini to notepad and paste into your next post. Really reluctant now to either tell you to change the primary boot device to the HD or change drive letter. Not having a C partition is really odd

Also in the BIOS, whats the primary boot device and the Secondary and so on? If a device in the chain was taken out improperly - the card reader, that may cause a problem.

Regards - Charles

 

Charles, thanks...I've asked her to send that stuff to me, hopefully later today. [primary boot device has been the HD]