Hard Drive lettering is messed up...

[MaxDSP]

Just built a new rig, with win2k pro installed on a new 80GB hard drive, but I also have 2 40GB hard drives from my old machine, they were named C, D, and E (C and D were partitions of the same HDD). Now the problem is that in my new machine, these HDD still have the same drive letters attached to them, while the new drive that has Win2K installed on is drive G.

Can I easily change the lettering to C for my win2k HDD? I really dont care if the rest of the HDDs keep the same letter or need a different one (with the exception being the one that is drive C right now of course).

 

[MrChad]

The easiest way is to pull all your hard drives except for your 80 GB drive and reformat / reinstall. Both Windows 2000 and XP seem to get confused assigning drive letters during setup when Zip drives or other hard drives are installed.

 

[Flexicon]

Unfortunately, this is true. If you try to change the order using the disk management snap-in, you'll get the "You cannot modify the drive letter on system volume or boot volume" error. That happened to me once when I accidentally left a compact flash card reader plugged into a USB port and Xp labelled it "C". :| This drive letter BS is one of my pet peeves about XP and W2K. I hope they fix it in Longhorn.

One advantage to having "C" not be your boot volume is that it thwarts viruses (sometimes), but it can also cause some programs to not run correctly (i.e. Adobe CS).

Reformat and Re-install.

 

[MaxDSP]

This sucks...I spent like 3 hours installing and configuring win2k, apps, etc...now I either have to live with this or reformat and try again.

What if on the next reboot I only have the boot drive plugged in? Would that make it the C drive?

 

[MrChad]

Unfortunately, no. Once the drive letter for your boot / system drive is set, you can't change it unless you reformat.

 

[0rion]

Partition Magic, I use to have Partition magic and I think it will work with out losing any thing, don't have it any more so I can't check but you can try, or if someone knows. It is a realy good tool to have any way. EZ to find it to download.

 

[oog]

when you installed windows on the new drive, it was c:, right? and then the drive letter changed when you moved your old drives over? this happened to me. all you need to do is go into the registry and modify the drive letters for each partition, and you'll be back to normal. you can only do this if windows was originally installed on c: and the drive letters were changed by adding other drives to the system.

link to ms kb article on the topic