ESchine

I apologize in advance for this lengthy description, and would like to thank anyone who takes the time to work through it!

I have an Acer Aspire T135...when I got the computer I repartitioned the 160GB harddrive it came with, and threw in an 80GB IDE drive from my old computer for extra storage. I made the original hard drive two paritions, one for system files and OS, and the other for storage. I'm not sure why, but this is how those 2 disks (3 partitions) ended up looking on my system:
Disk 0 - Partition 1 - D: (Boot)
Disk 0 - Partition 2 - E: (Storage)
Disk 1 - C: (System)

To clear things up, Disk 1 is the 80GB of storage that I added... Windows was installed on the D drive. Furthermore, Disk 0 is a SATA disk, and Disk 1 is on the Master (end) connection of an IDE cable. I'm not sure why Disk 1 would be labeled C... I'm assuming that the way the cables are set up on the mobo that the IDE cable gets assigned drive letters first, which is why that disk took the C drive in the first place.

Here's where the problem starts... I now have a 3rd drive that I've been using as an external with an enclosure that I need to put internal. When I did so, I put it as a slave along with Disk 1 (and verified that they were master and slave in CMOS), but now when I go to start windows I get "Windows couldnt be started. File missing or corrupt: <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll" This file is with the windows OS on the D drive, but I'm thinking that by adding a 3rd hard drive on the IDE chain, that the new drive took the D drive letter and moved the SATA disk, (the boot disk) down the line of drive letters to E and F for the two partitions. That's my theory at least. I have messed around a little bit with CMOS and adjusting the Boot Disk Priority and even manually selecting a boot disk when windows starts, but it doesnt seem to work. Does anyone have a clue how I can rectify this without reinstalling Windows? Thanks a lot guys, and again, sorry for the wordiness!

ESchine

As an additional question, are there better disk defragmenting utiities than the one that comes with Windows? I've heard there are better but have no idea what they may be. Thanks for any advice.

kev1952

Did you repartition and format the 80 gig drive before installing it? I assume you did a fresh install of the O/S when you partitioned the original drive, yes? If the answer to either question is "no" then that is what you will need to do.

As it stands, can you access the C: partition and use it correctly? With the problem that happened with the latest extra drive I would be looking very closely at the jumpering of the drive(s). If you are using 80 core IDE cable (for both IDE channels) then they should all be set to CS (cable select). If not then make sure you have the correct master /slave jumpers set.

If you remove the second drive (leaving only the original drive in) does it still show as booting from the D: drive?

In short I would be removing all drives other than the original and doing a clean install of Windows on the C: drive. Once done then you can start adding drives as you see fit.