Confusing HD Drive letters in Windows XP

[choro-nik]

Windows XP has assigned drive letter F to my fairly new Samsung master hard
disk on which I briefly had Windows ME installed before buying Windows XP
OEM (but unbranded). I use and MSI motherboard and AMD Athlon CPU and an ATI
Radeon graphics card.

I had copied my user files to the old Maxtor slave drive HD which used to be
my D drive but now it has become my C drive for some reason. So I have C and
F for my 2 HDs with D and E being my CD and DVD drives respectively.

Tried reassigning letters to the two HDs but no luck as Win XP won't allow
the master drive which has Windows XP on it to be assigned a new letter.

Please note that my old D drive HD was FAT32 formatted but in the meantime I
dragged and dropped all my old user files onto my new master Samsung HD F. I
then NTFL formatted the old drive and re-dragged and dropped my old user
files back to the old Maxtor drive. No problems there at all.

But I find it very irritating and confusing that Windows XP and my Program
files being on a drive that has been assigned the letter F.

How can I resolve this problem so that I have the normal C and D letters
assigned respectively to my master and slave HD drives? What if I physically
disconnected my slave HD and reinstall Win XP? Or would I then lose access
to those files?

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

You have to reinstall, as there is no way to change the drive letter
assigned the system volume. You also will, as you suggested, need to
rearrange the hardware in the proper configuration before doing so.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org