Sp2 installing to wrong drive

[monoman]

On my PC, i have 2 disk drives, both split into 2 partitions. So i have the drive letters C,D and H,I

When i try and install the windows xp sp2 patch (the one that you download and install manually), it first extracts to H and then installs to H. It should be extracting to C and installing to C.

I have windows installed on both C and H and can choose to boot from either drive.

I think the problem stems from the fact that my C drive was cloned from my H drive. I had to change some settings in the registry to set the drive letters correctly.

The only other program, so far, that has had problems confusing the root drive is System restore which thought H was the root even if i booted in C. (I fixed this by reinstalling just the system restore program)

All other programs I have installed have installed correctly to C and run fine.

I've checked the %systemroot% and %systemdrive% variables and these are both set correctly to C

Where is the SP2 patch getting the system root from?

Cheers

ETA: The reason I changed the drive letter assignments in the registry is that even if I booted from the C drive, my root drive/ data drives would be H,I. This meant that if i loaded something in say Cubase, it would be trying to get the data from D even though it was actually in I.

ETA2: I notice in disk management that C is marked as (System) but H is marked as (Active) even though I boot from C.

 

[Apollyon]

Have you tried physically disconnecting the H: drive from the system temporarily? Power down, pull the power from it, reboot, and then try to update the C: drive.

 

[BenK]

I don't know if this will help with the eventual instal but you can specify where you want it to extract the files. Using the Run command from the Start button put in the path of your SP2 exe and add -x, you will get a window asking you where to extract to.

 

[monoman]

I don't know if this will help with the eventual instal but you can specify where you want it to extract the files. Using the Run command from the Start button put in the path of your SP2 exe and add -x, you will get a window asking you where to extract to.

I'll give this a go. I did try manually copying the extracted files over to the C drive before installing but this didn't work. It must update one of the files with the root drive letter during the extraction process.

Fingers crossed.

If that doesn't work i'll try Apollyon's sugestion.

Cheers both

 

[monoman]

Cheers, you're a genious, the -x worked!

 

[BenK]

awsome