Changing Primary Drive Letter?

[Hooobi]

Somehow I screwed up my last installation and my drive letters are all messed up. My primary drive is G: and my secondary drive is D: I'd like to get them back to C: and D:

Is there any way to change the primary drive letter back to C:? I really can't afford to reinstall again at this point.

I guess I should also mention that my 2ndary drive is running off a promise card and that both drives are IDE.

Any help appreciated.

H

whoops - forgot to mention I'm running win2k pro

 

[Zach]

You basically can't change the system drive letter in Win2K, you can change others though. What became C: though? If there's no C:, you could at least make D: into C:

In regedit, look at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SYSTEM / Mountedevices
You can change them around there. Don't change the system drive though! Notice that hard drives have short Data fields compared to floppies/CDROM's, might help.

I don't remember if doing that trick will screw up anything if you move around the boot drive's lettar, so you might want to research or wait to see if someone backs me up.

 

[SUOrangeman]

Won't work without reinstalling. I've been there and have dont that; the t-shirt wasn't worth the effort of other failed remedies.

-SUO

 

[Hooobi]

errr... somehow my usb zip is drive C:

so, if I decide to reinstall (for the 5th time) how can I ensure this doesn't happen again? I think it was a problem with the order it saw the drives when I installed and the way I had to set up the promise raid card

any ideas are welcome, I really don't want to have to keep reinstalling

H

 

[SemperFi]

I had a similar problem now my 2000 drive is J was D. About a month ago I reinstalled several times trying to figure out problems I was having with easy cd creator. Anyhow as I remember I formated the partition using my windows 98. And each time the drive was where i expected it D. When I reinstalled this last time I used the 2000 cd to format the partition. Now it is J.

I don't know if this will solve the problem I am just offering something I noticed.

Try formating the partition using a 98 boot disk. Remember to check your drive letters because a 98 bootdisk will probobly see it as c. Then install using 2000 cd and don't reformat the drive during install.

If you try this please post the results as I would like to know if this does indeed work. I spent at least an hour downloading and applying drivers, patches, etc. before I noticed the drive assignments and didn't feel like doing it over again. 😉

 

[CPORonin]

Yes that's how I got it done. Format whichever drive you want as C: with a 98 boot disk. Then when you begin the win2k install you can select that drive and format in NTFS if you like. It only seems to do the funky drive letter thing when you start from a drive that isn't formatted(sp) in either fat16 or 32.

 

[virtuamike]

Or you could just mark whichever drive you want C: to be as the active partition. Make sure after you've done it to redo your boot.ini so it points to the right boot partition though.

 

[SUOrangeman]

The main "problem" is that formatting during the install mucks with drive lettering. I try to use something like Partition Magic to layout everything before installing, thus preventing weird lettering sequences.

-SUO

 

[CPORonin]

Found an article at the MSKB on how to do it here.

 

[SemperFi]

Interesting. PRinting out a copy now just in case. I would still like to know why 2000 uses the last letter when it formats a blank partition though.

Thanks for the info CPO. 😎

 

[Hooobi]

thanks for all the responses guys.

anyone know how much havoc might be wreaked by following the instructions posted at MSKB? i'm tempted to give it a try but I'm worried it might cause more problems than it fixes

H

 

[SemperFi]

Hooobi, If you try this post back your results. I ghosted my drive after my install and drivers svc pack etc. I might give it a try myself.