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Windows XP - system hard drive is H: not C: - can't change it

D

DeMeo

Senior member
I have a system running with XP home.
There's one hard drive (no partitions)
The letter assigned to the drive is H: and I believe it's causing me problems with installations of some software.

Does anyone know how I can change it to C: ?
When I try using the disk management tools in ZP, it says you can not change (or remove) the letter on the system volume.

I think the reason the H was assigned is as follows:
I have a USB card reader (internal) with 4 different media car types. These were assigned C:, D:, E:, and F: - the CD was assigned G and the hard drive H:

XP sees the card readers as disk drives. I changed them in the BIOS to show as floppies (choice was floppy or disk). This made no difference.
Then I changed the assignments in windows so that the card readers and CD are now I: through M:, but it won't change the system volume to C:.

Any suggestions?

 
You can't change it without screwing everything up. Reinstall Windows with every other drive in the system (exception CDROM) including Media Readers unplugged! Then it won't happen again.

-Por
 
Before you go to all that trouble, there is a dos command that makes a drive letter point somewhere else but I don't remember what it is off the top of my head.
You could basically have your "C" drive reference the same partition as your current H: and programs that like to have a C: can have it
I'm sure someone could tell you the name of the command I'm thinking of, and then you could but it in a little batch file in your startup folder (or someone could probably tell you a better place to put it, so that it runs even before you log on)
 
Originally posted by: kamper
Before you go to all that trouble, there is a dos command that makes a drive letter point somewhere else but I don't remember what it is off the top of my head.
You could basically have your "C" drive reference the same partition as your current H: and programs that like to have a C: can have it
I'm sure someone could tell you the name of the command I'm thinking of, and then you could but it in a little batch file in your startup folder (or someone could probably tell you a better place to put it, so that it runs even before you log on)
Click to expand...

SUBST is the command you're thinking of, I believe, but I don't know if it comes packaged by default with XP. You might have to find an older version of DOS and copy it over.
 
Let me guess, is that Motherboard one of the new ECS AMD Athlon XP boards with the Card Reader that plugs into one of the Onboard USB Headers? If so I just built a system for a friend and had the same problem. I unplugged the Card Reader from the board then did a reinstall and had XP format the partition. After Windows is reinstalled then plug back in the Card Reader.

 
subst it is, thanks LeetestUnleet. It's on my xp box so I assume it's on his. Just type "subst /?" at the prompt to figure out how to use it and off ya go. At least give it a try before blowing away the whole installation.
 
I ran into a board that XP just refused to install to a C: drive. I finally used a 98 boot disk with fdisk and created a big blank fat32 partition. The install saw the blank partition as C: and asked if I wanted to use it and convert it to ntfs.
 
Originally posted by: redbeard1
I ran into a board that XP just refused to install to a C: drive. I finally used a 98 boot disk with fdisk and created a big blank fat32 partition. The install saw the blank partition as C: and asked if I wanted to use it and convert it to ntfs.
Click to expand...
No kiddin'..XP likes to install its happy ass where ever it wants to. But It works though. My XP partition is actually G:\(ME is on C:\)

 
Originally posted by: Dennis Travis
Let me guess, is that Motherboard one of the new ECS AMD Athlon XP boards with the Card Reader that plugs into one of the Onboard USB Headers? If so I just built a system for a friend and had the same problem. I unplugged the Card Reader from the board then did a reinstall and had XP format the partition. After Windows is reinstalled then plug back in the Card Reader.
Click to expand...


yep, perfect example 😉
 
*nelson voice* HA HA */nelson voice*

sorry, that wasn't very helpful. but yeah, make sure when you install, you only have the bare minimum hardware, then add from there.
 
Yep. It's an ECS board that came with the card readers. Whno'd have ever thought USB hardware would take precidence over IDE ?
You know, I usually add non essentail hardware after I install windows, but this time I just decided to put everything in at once and then install. That'll teach me.

I'm going to try to create an empty partition and name it C:. I hate to have to reformat and reinstall everything. The system's at work and it's shared by a couple of people and has been running for a few months now, so there's a lot to reinstall. Not to mention that XP activation BS that I'll have to go through again.
 
This is one of these good news/bad news things.

You CAN cange the boot letter assignment under xp:

http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=108

If I read your OP properly, this is NOT a good idea in this case. If your initial XP install always saw the Boot drive as H:, I would not try this.

I HAVE done this (worked great) when I was adding in a drive to an old system. In this case, the "new" drive had a valid ghosted XP install (correct for that system) on it that expected to be on "C:", and I just needed to convince XP to boot from it and not the "old" boot drive. After much cursing and messing with bios boot options, cable select options and hard drive jumpers, I finally RTFM and discovered that XP does NOT just assign drive letters based on boot order like older OS's--it works more like SIDs on user accounts in NT and assigns a number to the individual drives in the registry, and uses that internally. That is why the disk manager plugin can change drive letters on the fly without mayhem--it is only changing the letter we see, not the ID number XP uses internally.

At least as ar as I understand it...



 
Originally posted by: DeMeo
Yep. It's an ECS board that came with the card readers. Whno'd have ever thought USB hardware would take precidence over IDE ?
You know, I usually add non essentail hardware after I install windows, but this time I just decided to put everything in at once and then install. That'll teach me.

I'm going to try to create an empty partition and name it C:. I hate to have to reformat and reinstall everything. The system's at work and it's shared by a couple of people and has been running for a few months now, so there's a lot to reinstall. Not to mention that XP activation BS that I'll have to go through again.
Click to expand...

You won't have to go through XP activation BS again. Backup your *.wpa files to a disk, then replace them after the install. As long as any of your core hardware doesn't change, it'll be registered and there won't be a phone call. Hope this helps.
 
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