How do you change drive letters in XP?

[Pugchucker]

For some reason it put my new, main HDD as letter F, after my secondary drive and my two cd drives. For the life of me I can't figure out how to change the letters. Little help here?

 

[Skot]

Start, right click my computer, manage. Then choose disk management on the left pane. On the right, you'll see your disks displayed. In the top portion, you can change the drive letters of your hard disks by right clickin the drive and selecting the obvious. In the bottome portion, you can change your drive letters, by right clicking the cd rom and choosing the obvious.

 

[c0rv1d43]

<< For some reason it put my new, main HDD as letter F, after my secondary drive and my two cd drives. For the life of me I can't figure out how to change the letters. Little help here? >>



What do you mean by "main HDD" and "secondary drive"? If your "secondary drive" has a bootable OS on it that XP recognized during the installation, then it will have rewritten that drive's MBR and placed the loader files in the root of the first partition. If XP is installed on the "main HDD" (drive F then you're stuck with that -- unless you start over with the OS installations. You can't change the drive letter of the system partition on the fly, so to speak. If, however, XP is installed on the "secondary drive" then, as Skot says, Disk Manager will let you put the new drive ahead of the CD drives. (You'll have to assign the CD drives "later" letters than any that currently exist on the system first, then set the new drive to D:, then set the CD drives to E: and F:.

Are we understanding your question properly?

- Collin

 

[Pugchucker]

Whoa! Ok bere's what I did. I has Win98SE on my "old" drive which I made the slave on primary IDE 0 and installed a "new" drive as master on IDE 0. I installed WinXP on the "new" drive. I was planning on migrating everything over to the new drive and moving the old one to another computer. Now are you telling me that I am stuck and won't be able to use the new drive as my "C" drive? I'm in for a reinstall without the old drive in the system? THAT SUCKS ASS! Please verify. Thanks.

 

[Pugchucker]

OH CRIPES! You CANT change the bloody drive letter of the OS partition. This totally sucks. What an awful "feature" to put into WinxP. What the hell were they thinking?!?

However, I guess I could repartition the new drive and just make a big partition for files and just leave the OS on a small partition as "F." Is WinXP going to be installing "Program Files" onto the OS partition and other stuff or can I just partition it to its current size and forget about it?

 

[c0rv1d43]

<< This totally sucks. What an awful "feature" to put into WinxP. What the hell were they thinking?!? >>



Heh-heh. I realize that you're disappointed, but you should think about this a bit. What they were thinking about was making it possible for the OS to continue to work, and this is the way all Windows operating systems are made. Also, other operating systems don't allow you to change the way you refer to their system partitions (whether by drive letter or by another means). Naturally the operating system, and any software that gets installed to work with it, has got to be able to refer to itself. How would any part of the installation "find" itself if users could just decide to change the principle reference to the drive's location whenever they wished? In the past I have seen specialized software that was used for migrating Windows from one partition to another. It could go into all of the system configuration files and change each and every reference to the system drive, but it wasn't ever 100% effective except on truly simple system installations. For example, how would it know to change a critical reference in some application's own proprietary configuration file to the appropriate new setting? At least that application would be broken and would have to be reinstalled.



<< I guess I could repartition the new drive and just make a big partition for files and just leave the OS on a small partition as "F." Is WinXP going to be installing "Program Files" onto the OS partition and other stuff or can I just partition it to its current size and forget about it? >>



I could think of a number of ways you might deal with this, but I can almost guarantee that a clean install is going to be the least trouble for you in the long run. You can (usually) direct setup programs to place programs on other partitions, but there are a LOT of things that have to go on the OS partition, including service packs. You don't want the system partition to be crowded. Also, you don't want the means by which the computer finds the operating system to be subject to undue influences. If changing the physical structure of your system in the manner you described is important to you, make it easy on yourself and reinstall. I have a ton of experience at this sort of thing, and that's still what I would do. Of course I am a very lazy person.

- Collin

 

[Pugchucker]

Thanks for the advise. I suppose there is one benefit to the way WinXP handled the whole thing. I was able to run apps right off the old drive through WinXP without having to reinstall them in the new OS. That was pretty cool. I think I am just going to try partitioning the new drive, copy over the old one to the new partition and then make the new partition the C drive. That way I can continue to run all the apps without having to reinstall everything. If that doesn't work out then I'll do a reinstall. I'm still not dug in deep enough here that reinstalling would be a major chore.

 

[c0rv1d43]

Have fun storming the castle!

- Collin