I am trying to remotely troubleshoot a PC in a different city.  I am
going up to fix it, but I won’t have long, and am not sure what I will
need to bring.  Here is the situation.

It is a P4 (Compaq EVO) tower with W2k installed.   All of the
programs are on the D drive, not the C drive.  The OS is on D also, C
is blank.

When the computer boots, it gives a number of errors that all say that
it can’t find some component or other on the D drive.   For example,
it can’t find that adobe gamma loader on drive d (the path is
something like C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Calibration”).

When I have the user go into My computer, the D drive looks fine. 
They see all the programs there.  When they look in the start menu,
they see all the programs.  When they try to run one of them, it
complains about the D drive again. Also, the system tray is almost
empty.  All the cool add-ons are gone.

When I get there, I won’t have long.   Any idea of what to do, or what
to bring?   That system has tons of programs on it, and it would take
all day to reinstall and reconfigure them all.


Help!

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Request for Question Clarification by sublime1-ga on 27 Aug 2002 21:16 PDT

sherpaj...

This sounds like a computer where someone took the C
drive with the OS and programs on it and installed
a new one, making the former C drive the D drive, and
the new drive into the C drive. The result is that all
the programs on D are still listed in the registry as
being on the C drive. I'm surprised that it's booting
at all!.

If this was my computer, and I intended to use the 
current C drive as the main (largest?) hard drive,
I'd just copy the contents of D to C and reboot.
Of course, I'd do that in DOS, and if I remember,
one can't do this in W2K.

If it doesn't matter which drive is the master, then
just switch them so the current D drive is the C 
drive and vice-versa, (adjusting the master/slave
dipswitches on the drives accordingly) and reboot.

My confusion as to why the above isn't necessarily
obvious or useful should explain the need for 
clarification...  :)

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Clarification of Question by sherpaj-ga on 04 Sep 2002 00:35 PDT

I went over there.  The was no other drive, just 3 partitions on the
main drive.  Couldn't get anywhere.  Had to wipe and reinstall 2000
from scratch.   It sucked.

As sublime mentioned coping one drve to the other might work.  But as
he stated there is no Dos Version on Windows 2000.   There is a
command prompt available in the Accessories menu.

  I would suggest that when you boot the computer you hit F1/F2 to go
into setup and look at the bootup sequence.  Obviously it is booting
up from D drive as you say there is nothing on C Drive.  But this may
point you in the right direction.

Good Luck,
morningstar