changing drive from D: to C:

[sillyputty]

I'm going to be buying a new HD soon, mostly to replace my aging WD
80g IDE. A while back, trouble-shooting my computer I switched the
other HD, a Maxtor 60g SATA, from one mobo connector to another and
ended up with my main HD with the OS (XP) as the D: drive and the
backup (WD) as C:. I'd like to switch them back. Is there a way to do
it with a new HD without reinstalling the OS? Thx.

 

[Andrew Bailey]

I'm going to be buying a new HD soon, mostly to replace my aging WD
80g IDE. A while back, trouble-shooting my computer I switched the
other HD, a Maxtor 60g SATA, from one mobo connector to another and
ended up with my main HD with the OS (XP) as the D: drive and the
backup (WD) as C:. I'd like to switch them back. Is there a way to do
it with a new HD without reinstalling the OS? Thx.

Hi Sillyputty,

In XP Pro (don't know if it's the same on other OS) go to Start > Control
Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management and click "Disk
Management" in the left directory list pane. You can now rightclick a drive
and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths...". You'll have to change the
current C: to an unused letter so that you can change the current D: to C:

Hope this helps

Andy

 

[Guest]

Hi Sillyputty,

In XP Pro (don't know if it's the same on other OS) go to Start > Control
Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management and click "Disk
Management" in the left directory list pane. You can now rightclick a drive
and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths...". You'll have to change the
current C: to an unused letter so that you can change the current D: to C:

Hope this helps

Since when does XP allow you to change the drive letter
of its active system partition?

A fresh format/reinstall is the best option.

 

[Randy]

Since when does XP allow you to change the drive letter
of its active system partition?

A fresh format/reinstall is the best option.

If the person unhooks the second drive and boots from the original,
everything will be solved. The boot record did not move on that HD.
Formatting and reinstalling XP is not necessary.

 

[Conor]

I'm going to be buying a new HD soon, mostly to replace my aging WD
80g IDE. A while back, trouble-shooting my computer I switched the
other HD, a Maxtor 60g SATA, from one mobo connector to another and
ended up with my main HD with the OS (XP) as the D: drive and the
backup (WD) as C:. I'd like to switch them back. Is there a way to do
it with a new HD without reinstalling the OS? Thx.

Not really as all registry entries and config file entries will
reference to the D: drive.

 

[Fishface]

Not really as all registry entries and config file entries will
reference to the D: drive.

When I first installed XP on an Asus P4P800-SE, the BIOS
was set to assign drive letters to all my card reader slots and
my boot drive was something like F or G. After a while, it
started to bug me, and somehow I managed to change it to
C, by changing references to the drive with the PC Mag. utility
COA32, editing boot.ini, and editing the registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
(http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q223188)

....after first cloning the drive to another physical disk to be
safe. But I think I was very lucky. Anyway, it is possible, but
definitely not for the faint of heart.

 

[Timothy Daniels]

When I first installed XP on an Asus P4P800-SE, the BIOS
was set to assign drive letters to all my card reader slots and
my boot drive was something like F or G. After a while, it
started to bug me, and somehow I managed to change it to
C, by changing references to the drive with the PC Mag. utility
COA32, editing boot.ini, and...

Why did you have to edit boot.ini? Boot.ini makes no reference
to drive names. You say that you made a clone. If you were to
boot that clone, you'd probably have to edit boot.ini to include
the clone's partition in the list of optional OSes. Perhaps you're
now really booting the clone and not the original OS?

*TimDaniels*

 

[Fishface]

Why did you have to edit boot.ini? Boot.ini makes no reference
to drive names.

Do you know what? I may be thinking of another time when I had a
separate installation on a second partition and moved it to the first
partition...

 

[Timothy Daniels]

Do you know what? I may be thinking of another time when I had a
separate installation on a second partition and moved it to the first
partition...

Yeah, in that case you would indeed have to have changed the
partition number in boot.ini from "partition(2)" to "partition(1)".

*TimDaniels*