Why is my hard drive drive F in XP?

[jpetermann]

Hey all, I loaded in XP last night, I love it so far, but my hard drive is labled as drive "F". How did that happen, and is there a way to relabel the drive letters in XP? HEEELLLLPPPPP!

 

[FlowerMan]

Dont know about winXP, but in win2k there's a disk administrator window that you can edit these kind of things I'm gonna get XP soon so I can play around with it

 

[LordEdmond]

do not change the drive letter in disk manager for the system disk the os will NOT work .

I had the same problem , what OS was installed before XP ? and how many hd's
if it was w2k and you have dynamic hd installed XP seems to set the disk to forign

I had to completely flaten the hd's and reinstall to sort it out

 

[jpetermann]

I had windows me on the disk before XP. I only have on hard drive hooked up at the moment. I am not sure what "flatten" means. Please let me know. Thanks!

 

[LordEdmond]

as you use ME forget the dynamic disk thought.

to flaten the hd is not nice but a low level format will clear the drive out, but beware if the util is not supplied with the hd do not do it.

use fdisk and delete the hd, If you have the full XP then do not create anything on the drive , XP should do its thing,



On more thought did you install from a bootable cd ?

if you used your ME boot disk it will have made a ram disk and this may have fooled XP, the me boot disk will then put the cd drive letter to early.

the bootable XP and or w2k setts its drive leter to A so no problems can happen

 

[jpetermann]

I booted from the XP cd. I had to go in and remove my logical dos drive so that the drive was like it was when new. Maybe I should have left the partition I had made. I had problems with the XP cd booting and installing. I think it was due to the dos partition. At this point I am about to reformat the drive, but I am not that familiar with ntfs to know what controls I have over the format in ntfs. Any advice is appreciated.

 

[d00f]

I had a similar problem. I installed from a bootable cd - however i have reason to believe my scsi devices are what messes the drive letters up. the scsi card initializes before my promise card so i just assumed that is why it loaded the other devices first on lower level drive letters.

kristopher

 

[LordEdmond]

when you install XP you do not need to format first.

put your ME boot floppy in and boot from that

run fdisk and delete the dos partition make shure all partitions are deleted then exit from fdisk do no more

then boot from the XP cd it will sort out the hd for you just choose the type of format ( you may not get a choice it depnds on the size of the hd ) all should be ok

 

[jpetermann]

that is the way I did it. Actually I booted from the WIn 98 startup disk that I had, deleted any dos partitions and the put in the XP cd. Do you think I should disconnect my zip and cdrw until I get xp installed? Don't know if it would help.

 

[LordEdmond]

yes but leave the cd connected maybe that what confused things

a full system spec in the first post would help us tp help you


I hope you like xp after all is sorted

 

[jpetermann]

Here is what I have:
1.4 T-bird on a k7s5a with 512 mb of Crucial 2100 ddr
Radeon LE
floppy
40 gig Maxtor hd
50x cd rom
8x8x32 cdrw
zip drive
ms wheelmouse optical
ms natural keyboard pro

Nothing else is hooked up yet. I already love xp. It is up and running, I just want to get my hard drive to be c: and I need to resolve the restart bootup problem. (When I hit "restart" it shuts it down, my board posts, and then the system hangs. If I shut completely down, it starts up fine). Just can't wait to get it all up with no problems!!!

 

[jpetermann]

bump...