Reinstalled XP on same part as before; now says D: instead of C:; how to try again?

[CZroe]

The system stopped booting (BSOD) after the user forced it off incorrectly and corrupted something. I don't want to format the drive but Recovery Installation was not available to me, so I installed Windows over itself and booted. Now, it thinks the primary/system partition is D :. I know that there's no way to change it after Windows is installed, but I want to try this again and I can't find a way to change from the Recovery Console.

How can I reletter the partitions and try again?

 

[Nothinman]

Unplug everything else from the machine while doing the install. Windows doesn't let you manage the drive letters, mount points, etc during install so you're stuck with whatever it chooses.

 

[Ichinisan]

Find a bootable utility that hides the recovery partition so the Windows installer doesn't assign C: to it. You can probably do it with a live boot CD with some version of Linux.

 

[CZroe]

Unplug everything else from the machine while doing the install. Windows doesn't let you manage the drive letters, mount points, etc during install so you're stuck with whatever it chooses.

There is nothing else. Both partitions are on the same drive. Thanks though.

Find a bootable utility that hides the recovery partition so the Windows installer doesn't assign C: to it. You can probably do it with a live boot CD with some version of Linux.

How did we do it in the first place? The system originally had Vista and you loaded XP on it.

 

[CZroe]

Well, I got the old installation bootable and it's no longer an issue. Putting the drive in another PC and deleting the drive letters before reinstalling didn't help (it still defaults to C: for the primary Recovery partitions and D : for the main partition).