Possible to rename my primary hard drive?

[JediJorgie]

Is it possible to assign some other drive letter to my hard drive? I tried doing it in disk management, but it says it cannot be renamed because its the system volume. That makes sense to me, but I'd like to find a way around that.

My reason for doing this is because I am getting a new hard drive soon. I plan on formatting and installing windows on my new SATA drive and then transferring my old files to the new drive. I'm affraid when I plug my old drive back in when everything is installed, there will be a problem because there will be two C drives. So if I can rename my current drive I could avoid that. I could just let the new drive be D or something, but I'd like it to be C like I'm used to. It sounds anal, I know, but I'd like to do it if possible.

 

[zest]

You cannot have hard drives ( local drives) or any other drives with the same letter.
Windows will assign drive volume lettes automalically.

In Win98 you can tight cick on the drive and name it whatever you want, don't think that can be done in XP/Vista.
Just install the dive before you format.

 

[chusteczka]

The drive letter is the reference name for that operating system. If you disconnect or remove the current C: drive, then install your new drive, then install MS Windows on the new drive, this new drive will have the C: designation. The previous C: drive that was disconnected can then be reconnected and it will automatically be given a new drive letter by the current operating system. No problem.

If you wish, you can manually change drive letters through Disk Management as you mentioned, only the system drive letter cannot be changed.

I would recommend a Seagate hard drive for your new purchase.

 

[Auric]

When the new drive is the active boot drive, the old drive's volume letters will dynamically change to the next available and may be manually changed although that shan't be necessary.

If you don't absotootly want the hassle of setting up Windows again, the storage controller can be configured to Standard then the old drive cloned to the new and booted from there. If that fails, Windows setup -> repair will do the trick. Best to have SP2 integrated on a CD. There are automatic proggies available for this such as AutoStreamer.

 

[JediJorgie]

Interesting, I didn't know windows would automatically reassign my old drive a different letter. Will it be a problem if both hard drives have XP installed though? I won't wipe my old drive until I've copied my files to the new drive. I'm guessing when I start up it will ask me to choose an OS to use and then I'd just have to pick the new install. Am I correct in thinking this?

 

[Auric]

No, because the boot drive will be determined from the CMOS Setup.

FYI, if there was a single drive with two OS installations on seperate partitions, the active one could be toggled and conversely hidden (the latter may be optional). I used to do this with PartitionMagic (or the purposely designed BootMagic) although there is a similar functionality possible via the bootloader.

 

[ElFenix]

when you get your new drive, rather than reinstalling windows i would suggest using the drive manufacturer's imaging software that comes in every retail hard drive kit. it'll copy everything over properly and is as simple as could be.

 

[Auric]

Yeah, I think I confoozed this with 'nutha thread where the HDD was being transferred to a new system, ergo the suggestion to avoid setup. But really, you just need to clone as ElFenix sez unless you can't stand that "not so fresh feeling".