How to change the drive letter on a system drive

[nwrigley]

I'm having a lot of trouble trying to do a fresh install of XP on my system. I regularly reinstall the OS and have done so on several computers, so I am fairly knowledgeable about the process.

The problem that I'm having is that I have two older IDE hard drives and one newer SATA drive on my system. The SATA drive is faster, so I want to install the OS to this drive (plus it has less wear and tear on it). I actually had my OS on this drive previously but made a few mistakes.

1) I didn't partition the drive to have the OS/programs and files on separate partitions. This was never an issue in the past, but is a bigger deal with a 250gig drive (I want to be able to reinstall the OS without having to back up the whole 250gigs worth of data).

2) I installed the OS on the SATA drive without removing the copy that I had on the older drive, because I wanted to have a back-up copy of XP to boot to in case I had any problems. What I wasn't thinking through was this meant the actual boot file would be on the older drive, meaning that I had to keep that file there.

So, when I go to reformat the old drive with the boot file and the SATA drive I run into a couple of problems. First of all it won't let me choose the drive letter for the SATA partition that I want to install the OS to. The XP setup always seems to want to assign "C" to the old drive and then the system drive ends up being "F" - which is less than ideal.

The XP install also informs me that is MUST format the old drive and install some system files to it. It doesn't say that it has to install the OS to this drive; it just says that it has to format the drive and save some system files to it. This always results in it assigning to as the "C" drive.

Does anyone know why this would happen? I don't want anything involving the OS or booting to be on anything other than the SATA drive. My motherboard is the Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000 Pro (865 PE), which is one of the first boards to have SATA. There is an option in the bios to have the drive be detected as being on the IDE channel when no IDE drive is installed. I'm guessing that with this board it will only boot from the drive listed as being on the IDE 0 channel. Does this make any sense? I can re-order the boot priority of the drives in the bios, but this doesn't seem to have any affect. When I view the sata drive in device manager it is reported as an IDE drive (something acknowledged by the Gigabyte FAQ page as being expected behavior with this board).

What I'm looking for: suggestions on how I could install the OS to the sata drive without it having to install system files (whatever that means) to the older drive. Also (or alternatively), how to change the drive letter of an existing partition with an XP installation. Maybe I should just install the OS to one of the older IDE drives and use the SATA drive for documents. Obviously I wanted programs to load faster, which is why I would prefer that the OS be installed to the sata one.

Another problem that I'm having is that one of the IDE drives (I believe - haven't verified where the noise is coming from) is emitting a high pitched whine that sounds like it is churning and eventually stops a few seconds after the computer has booted. The drive hasn't shown any obvious signs of performance problems, but I wouldn't trust it with critical data. I was planning on leaving it in for back-ups since I don't really have anything else to do with it, but right now I'm leaning towards taking it out altogether.

I know this is a huge post, but I have a lot of problems going on at the same time. Thanks for any help!

 

[Seekermeister]

Disconnect the PATA drives and reinstall on the SATA. Then reconnect the PATAs afterward.

 

[Rilex]

Windows orders drive letters by their placement on IDE channels, so PATA Ch0 Master (drive 0, C: ), PATA Ch0 Slave (drive 1 D🙂, PATA Ch1 Master, etc... followed by SATA drives.

 

[nwrigley]

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
Disconnect the PATA drives and reinstall on the SATA. Then reconnect the PATAs afterward.

That crossed my mind, but I'm afraid the SATA drive won't boot after I reconnect the PATAs. I guess the worse case scenario is that I just have to re-do the install again, so I probably will see if that works. If it doesn't boot after reconnecting the PATAs, then I suppose that would rule out the possibility of installing the OS to the SATA drive any other way while also using PATA drives. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[nwrigley]

Originally posted by: Rilex
Windows orders drive letters by their placement on IDE channels, so PATA Ch0 Master (drive 0, C: ), PATA Ch0 Slave (drive 1 D🙂, PATA Ch1 Master, etc... followed by SATA drives.

Well, that's what I found out through experience. I'm hoping there is a way around this. I have no idea why they don't give you an option to choose a drive letter when your setting it up (they let you choose a drive letter when formatting from disk manager). I mean, I can't be the first person who wanted to install their OS to a SATA drive as the "C" drive while also using PATA drives.

 

[Navid]

Originally posted by: nwrigley

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
Disconnect the PATA drives and reinstall on the SATA. Then reconnect the PATAs afterward.

That crossed my mind, but I'm afraid the SATA drive won't boot after I reconnect the PATAs. I guess the worse case scenario is that I just have to re-do the install again, so I probably will see if that works. If it doesn't boot after reconnecting the PATAs, then I suppose that would rule out the possibility of installing the OS to the SATA drive any other way while also using PATA drives. Thanks for the suggestion.

Do exactly as he suggested and it will work. You just have to make sure that the SATA drive still has boot priority in the BIOS after you reconnect your PATA drives.

But, you first need to disconnect the PATA drives and do a fresh install on the SATA drive.

 

[Smilin]

not sure if this applies. I've only skimmed.


FYI: there is a kb on how windows assigns letters during startup. Note: don't even bother trying to reghack the boot drive letter after setup completes. Any other drive letter can be changed easily via disk management though.



so. I've got an nvidia 590 chipset. It has onboard raid plus an onboard silcon graphics raid controller. I'm using 2xraptors in a raid 0 for my OS and a 500gig standalone sata data drive. I simply could *not* get my boot and system drives to both be on C:. I finally had to add my data drive as a single disk jbod raid array on the same controller as the raid 0 to get it to work. No, no performance hit that I can tell. The controller appears to do just fine and the data was all shooting across the same busses anyway.

 

[nwrigley]

Originally posted by: Navid

Originally posted by: nwrigley

Originally posted by: Seekermeister
Disconnect the PATA drives and reinstall on the SATA. Then reconnect the PATAs afterward.

That crossed my mind, but I'm afraid the SATA drive won't boot after I reconnect the PATAs. I guess the worse case scenario is that I just have to re-do the install again, so I probably will see if that works. If it doesn't boot after reconnecting the PATAs, then I suppose that would rule out the possibility of installing the OS to the SATA drive any other way while also using PATA drives. Thanks for the suggestion.

Do exactly as he suggested and it will work. You just have to make sure that the SATA drive still has boot priority in the BIOS after you reconnect your PATA drives.

But, you first need to disconnect the PATA drives and do a fresh install on the SATA drive.

Thanks for the help guys, I really do appreciate it. I'll give this a shot and keep my fingers crossed.

 

[nwrigley]

Just to let everyone know - I tried installing it with the PATA drives disconnected and it worked. I was able to set it up as the C: drive and then when I reconnected the PATA it all worked without a hitch.

It seems pretty obvious to me now, but I needed a push to get on the right track.

Thanks again!