Pls Help with HD Designation

[John]

I'm running Windows XP Pro and had a system crash which required me to
format my HD and reinstall Windows. Prior to the crash my Hard drives
were designated as:
Main Drive = C
Secondary Hard Drive = D
External Hard Drive = E
CD Drive = F
DVD Drive = G
After formatting and reinstalling Windows XP Pro, the designations
were all mixed up. I was able to go to the disk management and get
all the drives changed except for the main drive. The current
designations are:
Main Drive = G
Secondary = D
External = E
CD = F
DVD = H
I cannot get the main drive back to C and some of my programs require
a C drive. Any help would be appreciated.
I contacted M$ with the problem and they said they would help me for a
price. My previous experiances with M$ help have been very
disappointing.
Also, another problem. Previously, when I booted up, the computer
would boot up all the way to the desktop. Now, after the XP screen, I
get a logon window which I have to click on. Since I'm the only user,
I don't use a password. How do I get rid of the password logon?
Thanks again for any help.

 

[Guest]

And when you reformated, it didn't ask you what you wanted to designated your
primary drive as?

 

[John]

I don't believe it did. It required me to partition the disk and I
partitioned it as 1 partition and it was called
disk 0.

 

[S. Taylor]

Did you set the 1st partition on disk 0 as the active partition ?

 

[John]

I believe I did - not sure.

Did you set the 1st partition on disk 0 as the active partition ?

 

[S. Taylor]

When using 2 physical drives, the drive attached to the end of the ide cable
is
drive 0 ( aka hdd 0 ) and is usually the 1st drive detected by the bios
during post,
so the 1st partition on that drive becomes C: , by default.
And to be used as the boot drive a partition has to be set as the active
partition.
Only one partition on a drive can be set as the active partition.
The 1st active partition found becomes the prefered drive for installing the
os,
thus it's possible to have D: as the boot drive.

Start troubleshooting your problem by disconnecting the external drive and
the secondary drive.
I am, of course assuming that you installed to what is now G:, correct?
While disconnecting the secondary drive, make sure the main hdd is using the
last connector on the
ide cable, that it's ide cable is plugged into the IDE 0 connector on the
motherboard,
and that pins on the back of the device are configured as Master.
Then check in your bios and make sure it is listed as the Primary Master
Device.

If none of that helps, continue reading

From within windows, open a command prompt.
Type in the following commands
diskpart
select volume
select disk
detail partition

it should respond with something like :
Partition 1
Type : 07 (probably different on you setup)
Hidden : No
Active :Yes

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size
Status Info
------------- --- ------------- ------- ---------- ------- ---------
--------
* Volume 2 C System Disk NTFS Partition 14 GB Healthy
System

If thats the only partition on the drive and it says "Active : No",
then type in:
active
exit
exit
Then reboot.
If that doesn't do the trick, then you'll probably have to delete the
partition and remake it.