Good god what a day it has been. And it’s no where near over yet.
It has started with accidentally the jumper of one of my hard drives, to my secondary hard drive not being noticed in Windows.
First I had to use father’s computer to get a print out of the step by step thingy I typed out for myself to reinstall Windows XP. After several edits to said .txt file, I finally got my print out and started after talking with Fishy, who would need to be there to hold my hand for the next 24 hours.
I started with doing what I did in the past, and what I was told to do in the past: unplug my secondary hard drive before starting. And since I’ve been used to my Primary drive on the top, and the Secondary drive on the bottom, I started to remove the bottom cables…
Did that. As I was doing it I pulled out the jumper (the little blue thing that’s attached to the pins) to the drive. Paniced, then tried to put it where it would fit and reconnected the cables. Booted up fine after that. So apparently I unplugged the primary by mistake. 😛
I checked BIOS, saw it was listed as a Slave. So I told Fishy. He helped me to set the jumper back to the Master position and it worked. Now I knew which one was the secondary.
So again I shut down, grounded myself, removed the cables. I tried to boot into Windows to verify that it was removed, and I saw “NTLDR is missing” instead.
So I tried to plug the cables back in, still happening.. oh shit.
“This never happened before!!” I yelled, because both drives were IDE back then. I never had to mess with a fucking SATA drive!
Ran for my father’s computer, having to install Steam temporarily just to get ahold of Fishy. Got contact. He told me to just try to install Windows anyway.
So I did, with the secondary HDD still plugged in. What a relief it was when I saw Windows installing itself like nothing ever happened.
That was… until it finally got done and I tried to move my crap back, when I noticed.. “hey… my… My E drive is now the C drive?!?!”.
What’s worse, is my games were also moved to the drive, with Windows being on the wrong drive… or so I thought.
I asked Facepunch due to a delayed response from Fishy. They acted like they were clueless as to what was the problem. Finally they told me to try to unplug the SATA drive and re-reinstall Windows, but I told them “What about the duplicate Windows install?”
Didn’t get a response from them, then tried it. When I saw I was about to format what would had removed all of my games and backups, I stopped, plugged back in the secondary and asked Facepunch again.
They acted like the data never moved on me. So then I tried going back into Windows Setup after backing up what I could of my games (the Steam folder had to go because of its size) to my External Hard Drive, and “formatted” my “E” drive, and removed the Windows install.
Then I left, unplugged the SATA, and made sure Windows was going to be fucking installed on the C drive.
Finally I got it… but NOW, Windows won’t recognize my secondary drive! D:
BIOS says it’s there, and is listed as the secondary. I tried going to XP’s Computer Management thingy, and it did show the drive, but as Unallocated. What’s worse, I think I screwed up YET AGAIN by telling Windows to install on my secondary HDD, thinking it was my Primary HDD!
All I know is it shows Windows being on my 250GB. That is my god damn Games drive! And the 160GB is now going to be called my Games drive…
Yet I did unplug my secondary drive after “formatting” it. So how… HOW?! Is BIOS playing tricks on me?!
Doing research on the drives (thank you, Google), my “ST3250820A” drive is my 250GB IDE HDD. This should be my Games drive, which I thought was the Primary.
And the “ST3160813AS” drive is my 160GB SATA. This should be my Primary drive, which I thought was the Secondary.
So all along I have been installing Windows to my secondary, thinking it was the primary and I didn’t had to move all of my crap to the external… OY!!
But something just doesn’t make sense… if the bottom drive is the secondary, then why did Windows not boot when the secondary was unplugged? It should had still booted if the top drive is the Primary.
Unless something fucked BIOS up, and switched drives on me. I need to get back in there, set my secondary’s jumper to Slave instead of Master, then my SATA drive as the 1st drive, and my IDE as the 2nd drive, then re-re-reinstall Windows and see if it installs correctly on the SATA drive instead of my secondary.
But I’m going to wait on that thought until I get a chance to talk to the main guy that built my system.. if he even comes back to work. Though I do understand if he’s still sick. But I feel sick too of not having Windows installed on the correct drive.
.
And can you believe I did all of this… over one god damn game BSODing on me?