Change Drive Letter ??

[InOverMyHead]

My two physical hdd's are designated by W2K as D Drive (has old Win98 OS -
formatted FAT32) and E Drive (holds W2K OS - formatted NTFS). Is there any
way to change them to C Drive and D Drive?

Under Disk Manager it shows my external firewire drive (was C Drive till I
changed it to H Drive) as Disk0 (Healthy), the D Drive as Disk1 (Healthy -
System), and the E Drive as Disk2 (Healthy - Boot). But when I try to
"Change Drive Letter and Path - Edit" on D or E Drives - it pops up and
says, "Cannot modify the drive letter of your system or boot volume."

So, is there no way to make D and E become C and D?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Bob

 

[Colon Terminus]

If I understand you correctly, you wand "D" to become "C" and "E" to become
"D".

My advice ... don't even try it.

Here's a Microsoft KnowledgeBase article pertaining to that:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;223188

Even if you follow that advice to the letter, it ain't gonna work in your
case. You'll wind up with a totally trashed system.

If it's REALLY important to you that the drive letters be C and D, then
backup your data and perform the three "R's" ... Reformat, Repartition and
Reinstall. Make sure you don't have ANY external drives attached when you do
the reinstall.

 

[Oli Restorick]

I'll second that.

If I understand you correctly, you wand "D" to become "C" and "E" to become
"D".

My advice ... don't even try it.

Here's a Microsoft KnowledgeBase article pertaining to that:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;223188

Even if you follow that advice to the letter, it ain't gonna work in your
case. You'll wind up with a totally trashed system.

If it's REALLY important to you that the drive letters be C and D, then
backup your data and perform the three "R's" ... Reformat, Repartition and
Reinstall. Make sure you don't have ANY external drives attached when you do
the reinstall.

 

[InOverMyHead]

Why doesn't action described in KB 223188 work? Sounds very do-able to me.
Unless it means:

1) All my installed/registered programs on E won't work when it becomed
D, because the registry still thinks they are are on E?

2) And - should I expect all shortcuts to programs on old E Drive to not
work after it becomes D drive? If so, that would not be impossible to
change.

But I would NOT want to run into (1) above.

Any thots would be helpful, and informative.

Bob

 

[Paul Dietrich]

Why doesn't action described in KB 223188 work? Sounds very do-able to
me.

Coming in late, but consdier the following situation:
A Floppy
C HDD D CD
E ANOTHER HDD
F ZIP


Say you want to arrange your letters so that C and D are the HDDs. More
"Logical"

Like SO

A Floppy
C HDD
D ANOTHER HDD
E ZIP
F CD


You Cannot Simply change Drive E to D. Why? D is taken (CD).
What To Do: Rename D to an availible Letter (Lets say 'T' for Temp)
and THEN Rename E to D. Follow this procedure to accomplish the remaining
swaps.

You Should be FINE. The only worry is that registry entries may not be
updated properly.

 

[Paul Dietrich]

...and who needs the registry, anyway? ;-)

Forgot the part about making backups before doing stuff like this.

 

[Bob I]

If you want
1) An operating computer and
2) The drive letters in the desired arrangement

The ONLY answer is
FOLLOW the recommendation by "CT", anything else is a shortcut to disaster.