Change the drive letter of the drive XP is installed on?

[BigToque]

For some reason, WinXP installed itself on drive G, when it was the 2nd primary partition on the system.

How it's partitioned:

1. FAT32 (primary)
2. NTFS (Pirmary)
3. EXTENDED (primary)
-> 4. FAT32

(5. CDROM1)
(6. CDROM2)

You would expect:

1 = C
2 = D
3 = No letter
4 = E
(5 = F)
(6 = G)

But I got:

1 = C
2 = G
3 = No letter
4 = D
CDROM1 = E
CDROM2 = F

Anyway, I'm weary of changing the drive letter through Disk Management in Admin Tools. I know that Win2K hates having its letter changed.

What's the correct way of dealing with this and keeping all programs still working? (I've just done a fresh install and run Windows Update - nothing else has been installed)

 

[bacillus]

within xp, you can't change the drive letter that xp is installed on!

 

[MajorC]

Absolutely don't change the drive letter! You can't from within XP and if you try it from a boot disk (Linux) your results will be bad........

 

[Speedye1]

Look around support.microsoft.com. I have changed it in the past but for some reason a additional drive showed up that I could not remove. It is possible and requires registry hacks.

 

[CTho9305]

Don't change the letter of your boot drive - trust me, you'll regret it. I'd reinstall with the drives labelled properly.

 

[PolskiKrol]

Yes, definitely do not change the drive letter of the boot drive... bad! While there is a way to do it with registry hacks.. it is not pretty and definitely not recommended.

 

[MrChad]

The only safe way to change the drive letter XP is installed on is to reformat and reinstall. When you reinstall, be sure to disconnect any drives that are not needed for the installation (e.g. extra CD-ROMs, RAID arrays, secondary HDs, etc.).

 

[Smilin]

Here's what you do:

FIRST, backup your registry. Run ntbackup and use the tools | ASR menu. Also set a system restore point.
If anything goes wrong from here, just boot to recovery console and copy windows\repair\system to windows\system32\config\system and you'll be good to go again.

Change to the drive letter you want using:
307844 HOW TO: Change Drive Letter Assignments in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=307844

Open regedit, and delete all the values except (Default) under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices. These will automatically regenerate (adds 5 secs to boot is all). Disconnect any external zip drives you might have. Search through your registry for references to G:\ and replace them with C:\. This will be tedious since you're going to need to pay attention for every search hit you get.

Make sure your boot.ini points to the right drive,
reboot.

Some programmers out there are sloppy and will use things like C:\Windows instead of %systemroot%. It's possible that anything you've already installed might have trouble after the drive letter changed. Anything written properly will work just fine though.

 

[BigToque]

well, I got it fixed up. I made the NTFS partition a logical partition and then reinstalled windows xp. Everything is fine now.