Resolved Can't change drive letter to C

Had my (SATA) 360GB C drive crash. Got new drive. Removed old drive. Left D drive in machine. Installed new drive on old drive cables (SATA). Installed XP Pro. Installation automatically assigned H to the new C drive. Now when I try to change the letter Windows says I can't change the boot drive ID. What is this all about? Only 2 drives and the DVD in the machine, DVD = E.

HELP Please!

 

I don't think you want to do that. If you do, you'll more than likely not be able to boot to Windows. All of the pointers for Windows in the registry now point to drive H and changing it can only lead to big trouble. A quote from the article:

If you read rest of the article, they are talking about a drive who's letter somehow gets changed after Windows has been installed. That's not the case here. Unless you start over (format and all), I don't think there's any way you can do this without big problems. If the letter bothers you and you aren't too far into it, I'd do it over. Unplug any extra drives you have in the computer before you install Windows. Including and external drives. Do you have a drive that's designated C right now?

Also, when you format, make sure you make the partition you're installing it on a primary partition. If it's a logical partition, XP will run on it just fine but I believe any primary partition on any of the drives you have will be given a drive letter before the logical partition. Perhaps this is what happened? Have a look at it in Disk Management.

Otherwise, you can just leave it as is. XP doesn't care what drive it is on. I ran it for 5 years as drive D (a logical partition) and it was ran just fine that way.

 

This all looks a little scary. I think I will strip the machine and start with one drive and do it over. As of now all I have is XP on the drive so it is just time.

Ron
Thanks everyone.