Monday, November 3, 2008

Installing XP on a computer with a smart card reader

I installed XP on an Hewlett Packard Pavilion a450n. This HP has a built-in smart card reader for 4 different sizes of cards. On the first try, XP installed the boot drive as the I: drive.

Disk Manager can't change the letter of the boot drive. When I tried changing the boot drive to C: by editing the Registry, I wound up with an OS that wouldn't start.

I removed the power cord and discharged the motherboard by pressing the on/off button. Then, I disconnected the smart card reader cable from the motherboard. The XP install then configured the boot hard drive as the C: drive. After the XP install completed, I again removed the power cord and re-attached the smart card cable. When XP restarted, the boot drive was still the C: drive.

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