Drive letter problems...

My system using dual boot Win98SE and XP SP2 has been working fine for a while now until yesterday when it started freezing in XP (mouse stuck and nothing happened). I tried to repair the copy of XP but wasn't given the option.

Thankfully I have a spare hdd (due to a failed attempt to RAID it) so I formatted it and installed XP SP2. Which runs ok so I suspect the other hdd is failing But my problem is that the the XP drive comes up as E: not D: (CD drive). I changed the drive letter on the previous install but can't remember how to do it.

And ideas as I've been told I need to do this before installing anything?

Thanx

 

You can't change the letter of a system drive or a boot drive by any normal and easy means. It isn't impossible but it's normally not desirable unless you have some specific goal in mind to justify it, such as when you deploy a drive image or clone to a second drive and attempt to boot it. Under those conditions, the drive letter needs to be changed to agree with the drive letter that the system was installed on initially.

I don't think any of that applies in your case. If you change your drive letter, the XP system will not have the proper path statements in the Registry and will be full of errors. Any software installed would fail to respond since the shortcuts would point to the wrong drive letter. Theoretically you can edit all those things but it gets to be much more than most mortals can pull off. I have also tried some migration softwares with limited success.

Your install will work fine without any change. If you must change it, and to have it work properly, the best method is to reinstall Windows. The easiest way to do that is to use a boot disk with CD ROM support that is tailored for installing XP. Most disks like that will assign the CD ROM letter as either the X: drive or the R: drive. That clears up the drive letter D: so that it will automatically be selected for your XP install.

 

I will add that the Registry key for altering the drive letters is at:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

You can play with that to change your drive letters and see if it's possible in your case. Since you have not installed anything, it's worth a shot. Maybe be for educational purposes for us both.

Good luck

 

Thanx for your help mate. I never thought of something so simple as a boot disc

I will try the registry trick and see if it works

 

Good deal.

Although you probably don't need it, here is a primer on changing drive letter assignments.

All the best and please post back you results for all to share.

 

For the educational purposes mate this made the XP install messed up. It couldn't read and needed a reinstall. Maybe don't try this at home

 

And in a totally shocking development, I did another fresh install after doing the registry trick and the XP drive is now D: Drive!!! Yes

Doing a chkdsk and hope to copy my data over so thanx for hopefully solving that problem mate

 

That was certainly a backdoor method that got the job done! I hadn't considered that possibility since it would require a new install and that was what we were hoping to avoid.

I can't argue with success and it would appear that you have achieved that.

As for Steve's suggestion, it would have given you plenty of trouble since the new install would not have detected the dual boot and also would have made the new XP install go to the C: drive designation. Win98 requires the C: designation so that would have been a whole new can of worms opened.

All's well that ends well.

 

I had this problem when I installed a new "C" drive when a second physical hard drive was active. You have to disconnect the second hard drive when you do the installation - a rule that I will always remember. Otherwise the new drive gets added as a drive with a letter after the last drive that is installed. This includes optical drive as well as HD's.

 

Just a quick follow up, the dual boot was known by my PC everytime (as this was a replacement install not a brand new one ie Windows98 already installed and setup for dualboot). I had the C: drive problem the first time I tried this and PQMagic was required