changing drive letters

[Guest]

Hi,

I have a system with two SCSI drives and two SATA drives. One of the SCSI
drives is the boot
drive showing up as 'C:' drive in my system. The other SCSI is a data
drive. The two SATAs are also for data.Under 'Disk Management' in
'Computer Management', I am trying to change the drive letter of one of my
SATA drives.

This drive has data from a previous installation of Vista, however, it was
not used for system files nor was it used for page files.
Unfortunately, when I try and change the drive letter (right clicking on the
partion in the 'Disk Management' Window and then clicking 'Change Drive
Letter and Paths...),
I get the following error message:

Windows cannot modify the drive letter of your volume. This may happen if
your volume is a system or boot drive, or has pages files.

Also, the descriptor text in the partition window contains the following:
Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition). Other than my boot 'C:'drive
which says: "Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)", the
remaining drives in this PC are described as : 'Healthy (Primary
Partition)'.

I have had no trouble changing the drive letters of the one remaining SCSI
(the non C drive) and the other SATA drive.
Does anyone have any ideas on how I can change that drive letter?

Thanks,
Shane

 

[John Barnes]

Your system primary boot files are on the SATA drive, that is why it is
labeled 'system' .

 

[Rick Rogers]

And as I explained in the .general group, this drive letter cannot be
changed until the system is booting from a different drive.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the replies. I reinstalled Vista a couple of times to the
aforementioned SCSI drive (not the SATA drive I am having the trouble with)
and when I booted the machine up the SCSI appeared as 'C:' with the Windows
directory files and Program files etc. However, I still could not change
that SATA's drive letter. I ensured that I enabled 'view hidden files' so
that I could detect some sort of suystem files that may have inadvertantly
been installed on the SATA but could not detect any. The only files were
the data files i.e. music, pictures video and documents that I had carried
over from another machine.

The work around with this, was to disconnect the SATA drive (actually both
of them) and then reformat and reinstall Vista to the SCSI drive that I
wanted to boot from I simply repeated the process I was doing all along).
When I booted into Vista, the SCSI drive appeared with the same
configuration info as it did on the previous installations. I then shut
the machine down and connected the SATA drives. When I rebooted, I was able
to change the offending SATA drive's letter without any problem! It is a
bit quirky but now I have things the way I wanted it.

Thanks for your input,


Shane

 

[John Barnes]

To make a partition the system partition, all you have to do is make it the
first active partition in the BIOS boot priority. You did that by removing
the other partitions. You did luck out in that your BIOS did not revert
back when you plugged them back in. Some do, some don't.