Windows XP Drive Letters

[Loophole64]

I am building a computer for my mother, and to make things simpler for her, I would like the windows drive to be assigned the letter C. The problem is that the hard drive is a SATA drive attached to an ASUS P4P800 Deluxe motherboard, and so my optical drive, and the 4 slots in my Inwin memory card reader are assigned letters first. So my card reader is C, D, E, and F. My optical drive is G, and my hard drive is H by default.

Is there any way that I can tell the Windows XP setup program what letters I want assigned to each drive? Or maybe there is something in the BIOS that will change the ordering of the drives? Any help on this would be appreciated. Thanks.

-Loop

 

[nageov3t]

there are programs out there that will change the drive letter and remap the hard drive, but I'd recomend against it.

I did it once, and had all kinds of issue with windows finding stupid things like DLL's.

best option would be to install windows without the card reader attached, and then attach the card reader once windows has established itself as C.

 

[Loophole64]

Good idea. Thanks. The only problem after that though, is that my optical drive will be C and the HDD will be D. I can't detach the optical drive obviously since I need it to install windows.

 

[Amused]

Yep, this problem occurs with Zip drives as well. It does NOT happen with optical drives. CD drives will still start with D and go down from there. It only occurs with removable drives such as Zip drives, tape drives, USB drives and card readers.

So you'll be fine just disconnecting the card reader and reinstalling XP.

BTW, this issue is described here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;304776&Product=winxp

 

[spyordie007]

Why bother changing it to "C"? Will your mother even know the differance? (mine certainly wouldnt, doesnt even know what "C" is)

 

[nageov3t]

Originally posted by: Amused
Yep, this problem occurs with Zip drives as well. It does NOT happen with optical drives. CD drives will still start with D and go down from there. It only occurs with removable drives such as Zip drives, tape drives, USB drives and card readers.

So you'll be fine just disconnecting the card reader and reinstalling XP.

BTW, this issue is described here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;304776&Product=winxp

indeed. the first CD drive is always D. even when I don't want it to be. heh.

/tired of having to switch the D and E drives every time I install windows...

 

[spyordie007]

why do you guys even care? I dont understand why this is such a big deal, Windows could care less what drive letter it calls the partition it is installed on.

 

[Lawranch]

It does matter, I have usb flashdrive that doesn't work as a C: drive and some programs hand up a bit when they try to save to C: first. Everything I read says don't change the letter on a boot drive.

 

[spyordie007]

yup, whatever it is leave it (dont change it).

If your USB flash drive has issues that it's "C" than mount it somewhere else (I mount mine to a folder location because I dont like that my 6-in-one reader would otherwise take up 6 drive letters).

You're right in that some poorly written applications assume that "C" will be your system drive, but they should allow you to change the path for saving something. If they have issues when "C" isnt present than you could mount something to "C" so it wont give you problems. I suppose if you really wanted to you could mount the default share for your system hard drive (in his case \\computername\h$) to C; than if applications tried to access it on that path they would be able to find it.

Drive letters dont mean much to windows, they are just a logical storage assignment.

 

[Loophole64]

The point is that it is supposed to be as simple as possible for the person I'm building it for. Of course you can change the install path for programs that don't bother to check what the windows volume is, but I don't want my mom to have to worry about that. It would be an annoyance.

I reinstalled XP with the card reader disconnected and reconnected it afterward, and everything is as I wanted it to be. Thanks for the help guys.

-Loop

 

[nageov3t]

Originally posted by: spyordie007
why do you guys even care? I dont understand why this is such a big deal, Windows could care less what drive letter it calls the partition it is installed on.

I'm really, really, really anal retentive I like the drive letters to be in a progressive order... C (hdd), D (hdd), E (hdd), F (cd), G (cd), H-Z (everything else).