changing drive letter.

[KoolDrew]

Ok I recently reformatted and reinstalled windows, but I have one problem. I like to keep a storage partision seperate from ym OS/apps partision and when I installed windows it made my storage partision that was already there into drive C and the partision with the Os on it is drive D. Now when I try to chage this through Disk management I get an error telling me this:

"Windows cannot modify the drive letter of your system volume or boot volume"

Is there anyway I can force it to change?

 

[Kinesis]

Sorry dude, your are hooped. The reason you can't change the drive letter is because the Boot.ini and MBR is on that storage drive. So removing it will make Windows unbootable. You can do some crazy file moving and editing to make it work, but that is not going to be fun or 100% successful.

My advice is to reinstall. But a couple of things to consider. If you are using IDE drives, make sure you have them installed properly. One being Master and and one being slave (that would be the storage drive), and this should be done through use of jumpers. Never...never set it to CABLE SELECT. This never works right in windows for getting your drive letters set up right.

If you are using SATA, then it is just a matter of changing how you have them connected to the Motherboard.

In either case I would recommend reinstalling.

Good luck!~

 

[spyordie007]

Yup I agree; I have seen some hacks that will let you move the data over but you can run into all sorts of various OS and application issues (not to mention that it's a PITA). The only safe way I've seen to "fix" this issue is a reinstall.

My advice is to reinstall.

Or how about just leave it be? Windows doesnt care what drive it's installed on.

If the only problem you're running into is that you *want* windows to be on the "C" drive is fixing it really worth doing a reinstall?

 

[ActuaryTm]

Originally posted by: spyordie007
Yup I agree; I have seen some hacks that will let you move the data over but you can run into all sorts of various OS and application issues (not to mention that it's a PITA).

There are a few application issues that can arise as well, if the default OS drive happens to be a letter other than the default "C"; namely, installation and uninstallation issues.

Case in point: some of the HP driver install/uninstall packages (especially larger installs, like PSC or All-In-One devices) vehemently loathe situations where no "C" drive is present. Spent an afternoon manually removing a corrupted installation (including all the registry entries. references to .dlls, etc) on a machine where a user did the very same during installation as described in the original post.

As stated above, there is no easy method to change back to the default "C" post installation. Dependent upon how often you reinstall (monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc), is possible just to leave the installation as-is until an issue arises. Personally, as this is a recent reinstallation, would advise opting for another reinstallation, rather than chance problems later on down the road.

Choice is yours completely, of course. Good luck.

 

[spyordie007]

There are a few application issues that can arise as well, if the default OS drive happens to be a letter other than the default "C"; namely, installation and uninstallation issues.

Case in point: some of the HP driver install/uninstall packages (especially larger installs, like PSC or All-In-One devices) vehemently loathe situations where no "C" drive is present. Spent an afternoon manually removing a corrupted installation (including all the registry entries. references to .dlls, etc) on a machine where a user did the very same during installation as described in the original post.

Yes, but this issue could be avoided if a "C" drive were created (regardless of whether it was the system partition).

 

[KoolDrew]

Thanks guys. I reinstalled yesterday after I posted this though

 

[ActuaryTm]

Originally posted by: spyordie007
Yes, but this issue could be avoided if a "C" drive were created (regardless of whether it was the system partition).

Actually, it couldn't. That was my first thought as well.

 

[kamper]

It could be avoided if you renamed the current C drive to E or something and then used the dos "subst" command to make C: point to D:

The only thing is you'd have to make sure it happens early enough in the boot process to make sure that anything looking for C does get redirected. But I agree, reinstallation is better.