Urgent help with Win XP needed!!!

I installed an additional hard drive today, after having a Philips 8x4x32 re-writer and an ATAPI 52x CD Rom drive ( master and slave on secondary IDE in that order)on the system and working happily for the last two weeks. Both writer and reader working great.
My hard drive showed up as F, so I went to the Admin folder and tried to change it to D through Disk management. It wouldn't let me, so I switched off, disconnected the CD drives and restarted. Still showed as F but managed to change it. Now, after reconnecting the drives and restarting, my CD-rom drives show conflicts in Device Manager. Both say registry corrupted. How can I fix this?? Where in the registry is the info for CD Drives??
I hope someone can help with this...it's urgent as I have a pile of burning to do. Everything was working great until this afternoon!!!!

To clarify...
Boot drive = C: / Writer = D: / Reader = E:
Installed drive F:

Removed D and E...rebooted and got C/F still. Changed F to D (OK) and shutdown.Connected CD drives ( to make E/F)and it said NO WAY JOSE!!! Corrupt registry settings.

ANY HELP GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED

I had a similiar problem when I installed xp pro. i have a promise ata33 card in my machine with a cd rom and a zip drive on it. my hard drive is on the primary onboard ide ata100 controller. my hard drive kept coming up as F: after the install. my zip was the c: drive. I also couldn't change my F: to the C: even after I changed the C: to something like H:. when I took out the ata33 card it installed ok, then i put the card back in and everything was cool. I believe there is some kind of boot file, maybe in the mbr? that attempts to keep the drive that winxp is installed on the same letter always to prevent program problems. I am only guessing. There is also some type of volume manager that also is involved here?. I too am curuious as to exactly what is going on. Anyone know the answer?

I've seen the same as well. I installed XP Home on a system with a PIII 550 and a Gigabyte ba-2000+ motherboard. With two harddrives chained together the bott drive was always D:\ and the old (spare) drive was C:\. The customer wanted the motherboard replaced anyway the problem was corrected.

OK, here's what you do:

1) Set the new hard drive back to F:
2) Reconnect the CD-ROM and CD-RW ( D: & E: )
3) Power on computer. Boot drive should show up as C:, CD_ROM and CD-RW as D: & E:, and new hard drive as F: This should get you back to where you started.

4) Set CD-ROM to G:
5) Set CD-RW to H:
This should free up D: & E:
6) Set new hard drive to D:
If everything still works, set the CD-ROM & CD-RW to whatever you want ( E: & F: )

HTH

[quote]Originally posted by MadDog:
<strong>OK, here's what you do:

1) Set the new hard drive back to F:
2) Reconnect the CD-ROM and CD-RW ( D: & E: )
3) Power on computer. Boot drive should show up as C:, CD_ROM and CD-RW as D: & E:, and new hard drive as F: This should get you back to where you started.

4) Set CD-ROM to G:
5) Set CD-RW to H:
This should free up D: & E:
6) Set new hard drive to D:
If everything still works, set the CD-ROM & CD-RW to whatever you want ( E: & F: )

HTH</strong><hr></blockquote>
Have you actually tried this? When I did something similiar I got the same registry is corrupt error as kiwinsn .

[quote]Originally posted by techs:
<strong>
Have you actually tried this? When I did something similiar I got the same registry is corrupt error as kiwinsn .</strong><hr></blockquote>


I haven't tried it in XP, but know it works in W2K....

I've used this technique as well....