ATA drive not mounting as a C-drive...

[mcintoshdrew]

I have a new ATA drive I've mounted - but the damn thing mounts as a D:
drive - skipping the C: entirely... from what i've read in forums, you
can't just change the drive letter since the D: lettering gets
hard-wired into the registry after XP's installation. I don't mind
re-installing XP, but how do I assure that the drive will mount as C:
and not pick it's own drive letter? Looking for a listing of steps
that I can follow to assure it mounts as C:

Little background:
- Used Norton Ghost to clone IDE drive (which I want to replace with
the ATA drive)
- Used my XP install disc to repair the XP installation
- Windows comes up fine - but half my stuff isn't working because the
drive mounted as D:, and it's not finding things it expects on the C:
drive.

Help!
(Please reply to (e-mail address removed) if it's not too much trouble)
Thanks!

 

[David Vair]

Redo the clone but after its done boot with only the new drive attached. Making this the only drive
present will give it the C lettering. You shouldn't need to do a repair install if the drive is
only thing changing, just boot with it and let hardware wizard do its thing. It will find the drive
ask for a reboot. After reboot everything should be running OK. You can then shut down and slave
the old drive if you want and format it and repartition within disk management.

 

[Anna]

I have a new ATA drive I've mounted - but the damn thing mounts as a D:
drive - skipping the C: entirely... from what i've read in forums, you
can't just change the drive letter since the D: lettering gets
hard-wired into the registry after XP's installation. I don't mind
re-installing XP, but how do I assure that the drive will mount as C:
and not pick it's own drive letter? Looking for a listing of steps
that I can follow to assure it mounts as C:

Little background:
- Used Norton Ghost to clone IDE drive (which I want to replace with
the ATA drive)
- Used my XP install disc to repair the XP installation
- Windows comes up fine - but half my stuff isn't working because the
drive mounted as D:, and it's not finding things it expects on the C:
drive.

Help!
(Please reply to (e-mail address removed) if it's not too much trouble)
Thanks!

mcintoshdrew:
I would guess that after you cloned your old HDD to the new one you failed
to disconnect the source (your old) HDD and make that *initial* boot *only*
with the destination (the newly-cloned) HDD connected, i.e., you made that
initial boot with both the source & destination drives connected. Does that
sound like what might have happened?

I'm assuming in all this that...
1. Your old HDD was assigned the C: drive letter, booted without incident,
and functioned without any problems, and,
2. The only two storage devices connected during the disk-cloning operation
was the source & destination drives. That's right, isn't it?
Anna