My symptoms are little complex, so apologies for the rather long post.
Following spam mail difficulties through no fault of my own with Sky Broadband, I was forced to reformat my hard disk, once by myself and twice by a Computer repair shop (who had to provide a written report that he had done so). The second time he replaced my hard disk with a Maxtor STM 3250820A model. I cannot say if the replacement disk was new or not and the dealer will not say. He did not charge me for the second lot of work and now has little interest in helping me. I did give him my original XP disk to use.
However checking with Belarc Advisor under the software section shows a different XP product key than the one I have with my disk.
Since this happened some 4 weeks ago I have the following problems with my PC.
1/ The local disk (Maxtor) has a drive letter ?L? not C: as is normal. My Computer show that this disk has a capacity of 127 GB, with used space of 8.50 GB. The Seagate/Maxtor web site shows that this model should have a capacity of 250 GB. Where I wonder has 114.5 GB gone to?
2/ Drive letter C is allocated to a removable disk.
3/ My DVD-RAM drive is now G (was D).
4/ My DVD drive is now H (was E).
5/ I keep getting the following error messages when I run certain programs in particular SpyBot Search and Destroy. Pressing cancel, retry, or abort has no effect. I have to shut down the program to get rid of the error message.
?WINDOWS – NO DISK
Exception Processing Message c0000013 Parameters 75b6bf9c 475b6bf9c 75b6bf9c.?
I also get the following error message when I try to use the Google shortcut on my desktop, although Google does come up.
?Windows cannot find http://www.google.co.uk/. Make sure that you typed the name correctly and then try it again. To search for a file click the Start button and click search.?
6/
I have a feeling that the root cause of all these problems is the miss-name of my local disk. As I now have very little currently installed on my PC I am happy to reformat again and reload my XP, but am unsure if this would automatically detect my local disk as C or not.
I have also read Microsoft article 223188, which details how to change a local drive letter.
My question is:Has any one had similar problems and found any solutions. If so I would be interested to hear.
Thanks in advance Brian