Is it possible to change drive letters before the windows xp install?

[ss284]

Im installing windows xp, but due to my stupidity managed to get the partition I want to boot from(20gb) assigned drive letter D:, yet the 140gb partition full of my data has been signed C:.

This is one hitachi 160gb drive, and the 20gb partition was originally formatted first, and the 140 second. On a new install, I deleted the 20gb partition and created a new one. This made my 140 gig assigned as c:, and if I attempt to install windows xp on the 20 gig, it places the system files on the 140 c:, and the boot files on the 20 gig d: partition. Is there any way I can make it so that by boot and system files reside on the 20 gig partition without reformatting the whole drive? ( I dont have a way to back up 140 gigs of data).

Thanks,

Steve

 

[excalibur313]

Yeah the same thing happened to me! I would love to be able to change it back.

 

[corkyg]

I think you can use Partition Magic 8 to create and place partitions. You can't change the drive letter because the BIOS runs that until after XP is installed, and it is first come, first lettered.

To do this with PM8, use the created emergency bootable disks.

 

[Nothinman]

Im installing windows xp, but due to my stupidity managed to get the partition I want to boot from(20gb) assigned drive letter D:, yet the 140gb partition full of my data has been signed C:.

So?

You can't change the drive letter because the BIOS runs that until after XP is installed, and it is first come, first lettered.

The BIOS has no notion of drive letters, some added them to the UI for the Windows users but the letter itself isn't used by the BIOS.

 

[RBBRMADE]

I did this on one of my machines about a year and a half ago.
I was concerned too, but it was no problem at all.
The machine ran perfectly fine like that. Most installs would default to the D: drive, and the ones that did not you could of course change manually.
If it aint broke, don't fix it! <my advice>
Ron

 

[tiap]

If you google you will find this very simple solution.

 

[Nothinman]

If you google you will find this very simple solution.

If you would have read you would have noticed that you can't change the boot or system drive letters.

 

[tiap]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

If you google you will find this very simple solution.

If you would have read you would have noticed that you can't change the boot or system drive letters.

That's odd because I just did it yesterday to a system

 

[Nothinman]

Not with the MS drive management tools you didn't, from the page you linked:

Changing the drive letter of the system volume or the boot volume is not a built-in feature of the Disk Management snap-in.

And even if it did work you would break everything that is being referrenced by drive letter in the registry, which sadly is a lot and I doubt your system would come back up after that.

 

[tiap]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Not with the MS drive management tools you didn't, from the page you linked:

Changing the drive letter of the system volume or the boot volume is not a built-in feature of the Disk Management snap-in.

And even if it did work you would break everything that is being referrenced by drive letter in the registry, which sadly is a lot and I doubt your system would come back up after that.

Works perfectly

Follow corkg's advice and the the link.

 

[Nothinman]

corkg's advice requires purchasing additionall software, and I've seen Partition Magic lose data in probably around 25% of the cases in which I and people around me have used it. And that's not a very good ratio when it's my data at stake, especially when there's no problem at all like in the OP.

 

[NightCrawler]

The easy solution is to hide all the partitions from Windows during the install except the one you want to install Windows XP on. This can be done wiith most partition apps like partition magic or partition commander.

You could run into one problem though and that is that Windows will always default C: drive to the first created partition on a drive.

If you create a partition at the end of the drive and then create one at the beginning, windows will assign the 'end of drive' partition the c drive. So always create the partitions in order.

 

[Smilin]

Don't ever have another drive plugged in at boot then.

You'll get a drive letter shift and Windows will break. Using Partition Havok to bypass "the rules" is asking for trouble. You're better off getting over your 1996 based fears that Windows won't run right on a D: drive :roll:

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Smilin
Don't ever have another drive plugged in at boot then.

You'll get a drive letter shift and Windows will break. Using Partition Havok to bypass "the rules" is asking for trouble. You're better off getting over your 1996 based fears that Windows won't run right on a D: drive :roll:

Actually in 96 I ran Win95 on F: for quite a while, worked fine, but it did irk me since I was so used to C: being the system drive

 

[Smilin]

Yeah, Windows has always been fine on an alternate drive letter. It's just in 1996 (to pull a random year ) 3rd party developers were very sloppy about proper installations. You would catch people installing things to C:\windows instead of %systemroot% for example.

 

[Nothinman]

3rd party developers are still very sloppy.

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Smilin
Yeah, Windows has always been fine on an alternate drive letter. It's just in 1996 (to pull a random year ) 3rd party developers were very sloppy about proper installations. You would catch people installing things to C:\windows instead of %systemroot% for example.

I still see programs trying to install to C:\Program Files even though I've changed %ProgramFilesDir%

 

[sundart]

In partition time itself you decide which drive should be active wheather,depend on OS will install in d:\ drive