Win XP installed on slave drive!!! How???

[rijir2001]

Okay. I have Win XP Pro on my PC and my primary hard drive died. I also had a secondary slave hard drive installed on the PC that I use for video files, etc...

I picked up a new drive and set the jumper up as a master drive with slave present. I put in my XP install disc and booted up my PC. It formatted the drive and installed windows. I then loaded a ton of other software.

I went to access my secondary drive and I noticed it isn't there. Well it is sort of but it was showing as unformatted. I found that interesting as it contains loads of video files so I pulled the secondary drive out and popped it into another PC and explored it. Well on it was all of my Windows operating system files! I pulled the other drive out and checked that one on another PC and it was blank (unformatted).

So basically Windows installed itself on my slave drive and wiped out all of my files. Luckly most everything was backed up. But how the heck could this have happened?

[aedipuss]

it happens. first thing anyone with repair experience does when re-installing the os is to unplug the power from all the other hard drives in the system. you weren't the first and won't be the last to be bitten by that odd behavior.

[rijir2001]

I almost did that but I figured "What the Hell!" Windows should know what it is doing.

[budz]

Probably when you booted the windows xp disc you didn't notice which drive letter or hard drive you were installing it on. Gotta pay attention because it does ask which drive or partition you want to install the OS on. You were lucky you had your files backed up.

[rijir2001]

Actually it assigned the slave drive as "C". That is what threw me when I couldn't see the "D" drive. The new drive I put in as master didn't even get formatted.

[buttzilla]

Actually it assigned the slave drive as "C". That is what threw me when I couldn't see the "D" drive. The new drive I put in as master didn't even get formatted.

Is the slave drive a parallel drive? windows will always try to install to the first drive on t h e first bus. usually the parallel drives are on the first bus. I always pull the plugs on my five other drives before i do a fresh install.

[chesterfield]

live and learn, done it myself.....best thing to do when re-installing windows is act like you are building a new PC. only have the essentials pluged in....One hard drive, One CD/DVD drive, your MOBO, CPU, Memory and Video card--that is it. and if you have a card reader, unplug that too....then when windows is installed, re-install one device at a time. a little extra time spent makes for a much better re-load....just MHO.....

[rijir2001]

It is an IDE drive.

As far as all the other PCI cards and stuff I pulled all of that before installing. Just an oversite. But a very irritating one.