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Changing Boot Drive letter WINXP

J

JimmyJ65

Member
I'd like some best alternative suggestions on this problem.

After some hard times, I finally got a good setup of WINXP home on my machine. The problem is, drive A is the floppy, drive C is my zip drive, drive d is my cdrom, and drive E is my boot/files/programs drive. I researched and found prodedures to change "E" to "C" but the consequences can be a real pain for all my loaded programs. With "E" as my operating system drive, I've already experienced problems with dowloading program updates and drivers for my scanner because they are keyed to seek drive "C". I've also had problems accessing some secure sites because the site checks encryption strength (128) through the "C" file system and finds my system lacking.

What is the best move - (1)change E to C and try to get all my stuff working again that is now loaded on E, or, (2)start from scratch (format "E"), reload XP with my zip drive disconnected. I assume XP will then load to "C" as the hard drive is designated for the setup process. After, I can plug in the zip drive.

My past horror story trying to load XP makes me a little gun shy of starting over again. Which is likely to be the most painful, option (1) or option (2)?

Thanks for all, Jim Johnson
 
Have you tried disconnecting your Zip drive and CD ROM drives and see if it then changes your hard drive back to c:?

Then once XP finds the HD as C: you can reboot and shut down then reconnect your zip and CD ROM drives to see if that works.

If not then you may have to go into the BIOS and check to see if it shows your C: drive as the first bootup drive. You can set the CD ROM drive as a second boot drive.
 
I think it would be cleaner if you started from scratch again. Plus, you should run into less problems, especially if you have a lot of applications installed currently. If you switch drives w/o reformating, a lot of programs will think that they are still on the E drive. Anyway, practice makes perfect!

Oh yeah..does anyone know if the repair function might fix this?
 
In 2k/XP hardrive letters are pinned to the volume serial #. Once 2k/XP is installed the letters will stay the same no matter where they are at on the IDE bus.

You cannot change the letter of your boot volume without re-installing XP as there are hundreds of registry entries pointing E:\ and when you change it to C:\ they will all become invalid.

I've had my Win2k Pro install on F:\ for 2 years now and have yet to see a single program hardcoded to C:. All programs I install default to F:\Program Files. I have not seen single error message pertaining to my install being on F:\ The OS and applications could care less what drive letter they are installed on.

Websites don't search your hardrive to detect encryption strength. They simply query the browser on its capabilities. The default XP sercurity settings for IE can cause these problems in some cases. To fix this go into the Internet Options control panel and set your security level from Custom to Medium. This should solve that problem.

The software development team at the company that makes your scanner's drivers/programs needs to do some better programming. Its bad programming to hardcode paths as not everyone's system configuration is the same.

The only way to fix this is a XP re-install with your Zip drive disconnected. A repair install will do nothing but "fix" the OS itself, all your applications will still think they are installed to E:\.
 
Stevewm and every body else that gave my problem a shot- thanks loads. If stevewm has gone two years with his "c" an "f", I'm going to leave well enough alone. My security settings could be the problem for most glitches. As for the scanner, I had to extract the files to a separate folder and then run the program to "E". Once this was done everything was hunky dory.

Again thanks all. I have to shut down this computer now and hook power to a computer I'm trying to upgrade for a college student friend of the family. Some headaches with the via apollo chipset on a GA-6VX-4X gigabyte board I had lying around and plopped in a pIII 600 cpu. I'll muddle through. But it is great to have so much wisdom available here in the forum.
 
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