Resolved Primary drive is equal "H"?

A Dell system,
Installing XP onto a new hard drive and it always defaults
to Drive "H ". I get no chance to change it to Drive "C ".

If i continue the install of XP, when finished it works fine
except the boot drive is = "H ".

Disk Maintenance will not let me me re-designate "H" to
"C" being its the primary partition.

I dis-connected all the card readers and when i boot from
the XP CD, it says "Drive 1 not found" (or missing) and
hangs there (won't continue booting).

During power up, with/without card readers, I cannot get
into the bios at all to check anything.

Any Suggestions at all will help,
Thanks,
savagcl

 

PeteC,

Thanks, I'll have to get the model number, system is not at my home.

It is a SATA drive and i do have the Xp CD from Dell along with a drivers and a Applications disk.

XP does install (without the "F6 "). Of course, the floppy
disk is missing.

I'll post back with the model number on monday the 25th.

Thanks PeteC,
savagcl

 

OK,
The dell model number is "Dimension 4700C" and it is a SATA drive.
There is no floppy drive available.

Not sure where to find the SATA drivers. Del.com only shows a SATA Utility
for this model....

Thanks,
savagcl

 

When you went on the Dell Website Did you try entering the Service tag number. It should take you to the drivers for your computer.

 

PeteC, Where can i check to see if the SATA drivers are present? I checked the device manager and it shows ATA.

It's a brand new WD drive, never used before, old drive was a Maxtor.

I tried at least 10 times from a cold bootup and could never get into setup via F2 but the boot menu (F12) did work.

lj50, Yes, i got all the drivers that applied and installed them. One mentioned a Maxtor utility that didn't work for
the WD drive.

I'll just leave it as Drive "H ", It's working good like that.

Thanks,
savagcl

 

did you have any USB drives connected while installing Windows, if yes, try without.

 

Hi Pete, I know a lot of people here won't believe me, but I have had the experience of doing it by mistake. I had a USB stick inserted without realizing when I did a fresh clean Windows XP install and it was not on C although I had no partition on the drive and the USB stick was showing up as C.
I did not want to keep it like that, although it was running fine.
The next install without the USB stick resulted in the OS being on C as it should.

 

I'm done. she can use XP on "H ".

Info: i had the multiport card readers unplugged. No USB
flash drives mounted.
When i checked device manager, i saw nothing about SATA.

Thats OK, she's happy its running.

I'll mark this thread closed.

Thanks all,
savagcl