Why you probably haven't seen me online / had email from me recently

[lovingboth]

It'd have helped if Partition Magic was honest about what its system requirements really were, but a theoretically simple upgrade managed to stop my PC from booting thanks it to going 'oooh, there's something odd about the partition table' and going ahead with changing it anyway.

The format of the partition table is an annoying hangover from the original IBM PC. It's a classic example of 'I wouldn't start from here' - why on earth do you have to still care about heads and cylinders? Especially as the actual disk drives re-re-re-translate the figures that various other bits of code have already translated back and forth, just in case you have ancient kit, and not always got the answer right.

So I've used this as excuse to put in a new hard drive and install WinXP Pro on it, dual booting along with Ubuntu.

For some curious reason, XP has decided that its partition, the only one it can see, should be... G:\

Erm, why?!? I'm slightly reluctant to reinstall it (although I've not done much with it) because that either means reinstalling Ubuntu (which has had more done in it) or faffing around with tools I no longer trust as much as I once did...

Comments

[vampwillow]

On two out of three machines running XP here it ended up on drive G;\ ...

[lovingboth]

Original MS XP install CD, or a not-necessarily MS combined XP+SP2 install CD?

I'm wondering if it Did It All By Itself or whether someone played around with the install script for a joke.

The former is a possibility - between the first boot of the end of the setup (which got cancelled mid-way through due to the length of time needed to play hunt the CD case with the serial number) and the second, it changed its mind as to which of the DVD writer and the CD writer was D: and which one E:!

[vampwillow]

MS XP gold disc (ie totally legal) as well as not-quite-so ... it seems to relate to whether there is already a disc partition in existence or not (ie start with totally wiping the hard disks or not)

[lovingboth]

Turns out it's a known bug (although they don't use those words)

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;326683

No Zip drive here though.

[pavlos.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall that Windows 2000 had a disk utility that let you remap drives to letters. I don't know if you can do that to the system drive, though.

[lovingboth]

Yep, XP has one too.

Nope, you'd end up with a non-functioning XP system. Part of me thinks it should be possible to change the letter, reboot into Ubuntu, edit the XP registry and boot files and then reboot into XP and have it work but realistically, I know there will be some other setting hidden somewhere that would prevent that or, worse, cause it to fall over horribily some months from now.