SATA HD shows up as D: drive

[hofinder23]

i just bought a western digital 74 gig SATA raptor hard drive. i also have a maxtor 250 gig PATA hadr drive.

I am trying to install windows on my raptor drive and have my 250 maxtor show up as the D: drive. However, the opposite is happening. when i go to install windows, it asks me to format the 250 gig hd first before I reformat and install windows on the raptor. and then my raptor shows up as the D drive after i reformat and install windows.

In BIOS i set the hard drive config to boot off the raptor first and then the 250 maxtor drive. but it still sets the maxtor as the C: drive.

I have an ASUS A8N-E mobo, with a 3200+ venice AMD 64 cpu.

what can i do to get my raptor to show up as the C: drive?

 

[JW310]

Disconnect your 250GB drive from the system before you start the windows setup and then reconnect it once you have Windows up and running on the Raptor. It's probably the only thing I can think of that'll force Windows to see the Raptor as C: . Once you reconnect it, Windows should still recognize the Raptor as C: and then make your 250GB drive your D: drive.

I've seen similar things happen with USB memory card readers and internal Zip drives. For some reason, Windows setup assigns drive letters to those devices even though there may or may not be cards/disks in those drives. Only way around it that I've found is to disconnect the 'offending' drives till after setup is complete.

JW

 

[hofinder23]

ok yea.... i was thinking that would be my last resort. but if that's the way it's gotta be done then i'll do it that way then. thanks for the input. i'll try it and see what happens.

 

[fire400]

assuming you do not want any data on both drives..

start up Windows XP from the "boot from CD ROM drive"

setup a new installation of Windows XP

erase both drives

partition the 250gig

install WinXP on the 74gig, it will automatically partition the drive before installation

 

[hofinder23]

ok now after i unplug the raptor and install windows the raptor shows up as c: but now the 250 gig hd shows up as f: drive. my dvd rom/burner are now D: and E:

any ideas on how to make my hard drives show up as C: and D:.... raptor being C: and 250 maxtor showing up as D:? is there possibly a way of just manually naming them instead of reinstalling windows?

thanks for your input!

 

[montag451]

From the beginning:
Use the drive that you want the OS to be on ONLY. Disconnect all other hdd's.
Once OS installed,
plug in other drives.
Go to disk management, and rename them.
You may have to rename cd drive to something so that you can set another drive to D,
But, on the whole, if you don't do a lot of changing hdds around, then, it won't really matter what names/letters the drives are.

 

[fire400]

Originally posted by: hofinder23
ok now after i unplug the raptor and install windows the raptor shows up as c: but now the 250 gig hd shows up as f: drive. my dvd rom/burner are now D: and E:

any ideas on how to make my hard drives show up as C: and D:.... raptor being C: and 250 maxtor showing up as D:? is there possibly a way of just manually naming them instead of reinstalling windows?

thanks for your input!

Using the Windows interface

Open Computer Management (Local).
In the console tree, click Disk Management.
Where?

Computer Management (Local)
Storage
Disk Management

Right-click a partition, logical drive, or volume, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.
Do one of the following:
To assign a drive letter, click Add, click the drive letter you want to use, and then click OK.
To modify a drive letter, click it, click Change, click the drive letter you want to use, and then click OK.
To remove a drive letter, click it, and then click Remove.