How do I change E: to C: ?

[JimD]

I've just upgraded the motherboard and CPU in my system. My old system
had a SATA drive with several partitions (including one 8GB for XP
flagged as C and two IDE drives for other data. I used the same
configuration in my new system, with
SATA set as primary boot drive. When I did a clean install an hour ago, I
noticed that the 8GB partition was listed as E: instead of C:, but
proceeded to load XP there anyway. The install completed successfully,
but now XP won't load because "NTLDR is missing." How do I change the
8GB partition to C: as it was before?

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

1) You can't reletter the drive that is the boot partition (houses the
system files).

2) Check what volume is listed as the active drive - make sure it contains
ntldr, ntdetect.com, and a boot.ini file that points to the volume where
WinXP is loaded.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[JimD]

If I were to do the clean install over again, how do I first insure that
the SATA drive will include the C: partition, since it's the drive I
want to boot from?

 

[Andy]

Assuming that C: and D: were assigned to the IDE drives, disconnect
them either physically or, if they're connected to the same IDE port,
by disabling the IDE port in the BIOS setup.