Seriously strange Windows boot-up issue

[Magnakai]

I was wondering if someone could take a look at my problem.
This is the first time that I can remember when Windows has completely and totally confused the hell out of me.
Normally I can happily come to the conclusion that it's fubared, but this is just plain strange.

Here's the deal:

My Windows had been acting up a bit for a while. My sound was constantly skipping. I suspected various causes, but I settled on installing a fresh install of Windows on a secondary drive I have installed.

I stick in the CD, install, etc. Everything seems fine.
Then, after I'd loaded up all the drivers and whatnot, when I was on the nice clean fresh desktop I went into Explorer and was a little confused to see that the new Windows drive, which was previously the F: drive, is now the C: drive.
What was previously the C: drive is now the D: drive and the old E: drive is now... the E: drive.
What's weirder is that I previously had the CD drive set to be the D: drive, and now it's on J: of all things. I can't help but wonder where the F, G and H and I drives went to.

Anyway, that's only the beginning. I chalked up the above to Windows quirkiness, and so I rebooted, wondering what would happen.
It didn't offer me the OS choice menu and went straight into my old install of Windows. The drive letters were back to normal.
Odd.

To cut this a bit shorter, I deduced that when I had the Windows CD in the drive, let it say "Press button to boot from CD" and ignore that, it will start up in the new install of Windows. If I don't have the Windows CD in or I have any other CD in the drive, it'll start up in my old copy of Windows.

Whilst it's sort of cool to have this little clean semi-hidden Windows install, it's also really confusing me.

It's just occured to me that while I've reinstalled Windows loads of times, it's always been when something bad's happened and my installation's died, forcing me to install onto a different drive or onto the same boot-drive as a refresh. In those cases, though, the drive letter assignations stayed the same. Still, I'm wondering if there's something rather simple that I have neglected to do.

I would try setting up one of those boot menus manually, as they seem fairly simple from what I recall, but I have no idea what to assign for each drive, as they seem to change dynamically.

Thanks for reading.
Any help would be much appreciated.

I'm completely foxed!

[MonkeyWrench]

I don't understand why you still have your ****ed windows install? Just format that F drive, set C as your primary drive and get on with your life. Having multiple installs of the same OS is just going to cause you grief.

[in5ane]

lol, best advice ever

[vertigo]

If you're using XP did you know that you can just run the installer over the old version and it won't destroy the rest of your data? It'll just refresh all the files on there and keep your other things like personal settings and stuff like that. I've done this a couple of times now and it's fixed basic problems with XP such as this. You don't need to format your drive and lose your data or any of that ****. As long as the physical integrity of your HD is ok, you won't lose any of your personal data, programme files, settings for those apps, anything. So give that a go.
Don't do a system restore, put in the CD and boot to it and just run the installer as you would when you're doing a fresh install. It'll tell you there's already a copy of the OS on that drive and ask you if you want to install over it. Say yes, let it do its thing as with a normal install and you should be sorted.
If you're running 98 or 2000, live in the now.

Also, after you've done your reinstall, download Registry Mechanic and run a full scan including deep scan on your system (you may want to get hold of the 'full' version from wherever you get things like that from) and fix everything it comes up with. A great piece of advice I was given on this very forum that fixed 99% of the problems my PC was having.

[Magnakai]

Thanks for the replies!

I don't understand why you still have your ****ed windows install? Just format that F drive, set C as your primary drive and get on with your life. Having multiple installs of the same OS is just going to cause you grief.

You're very right!
I was mainly keeping it just in case, but I am going to get rid of it soon.
It still doesn't resolve my worry about the renamed drive names

If you're using XP did you know that you can just run the installer over the old version and it won't destroy the rest of your data?

Yeah, I had tried that. Unfortunately it didn't resolve my original main issue, so I decided to go for a nice fresh install. Thanks for suggesting it, though. I might delete my original install and reinstall over my new install. Hopefully that'll make everything way happier.

download Registry Mechanic

I've been meaning to do that for a while! Thanks, I'll give that a shot!

[vertigo]

Bit of advice if you're using multiple actual physical hard disks as opposed to partitions. Disconnect them to avoid ****-ups. Especially if the machine can't seem to decide which drive should be the logical master.
Also, make sure the jumper settings on the backs of the drives are correct and that you have them located in the right places on their cables. This isn't something that should really affect things in this day and age, but PCs are **** and anything so small as this could be causing problems.

[Magnakai]

It's weird, I've been through this multiple times.
I've been building my own PCs for almost 10 years.

I've got the day off tomorrow, so I'll give it a crack and get back to you.