ATA drive not mounting as a C-drive...

  • Thread starter Thread starter mcintoshdrew
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mcintoshdrew

I have a new ATA drive I've mounted - but the damn thing mounts as a D:
drive - skipping the C: entirely... from what i've read in forums, you
can't just change the drive letter since the D: lettering gets
hard-wired into the registry after XP's installation. I don't mind
re-installing XP, but how do I assure that the drive will mount as C:
and not pick it's own drive letter? Looking for a listing of steps
that I can follow to assure it mounts as C:

Little background:
- Used Norton Ghost to clone IDE drive (which I want to replace with
the ATA drive)
- Used my XP install disc to repair the XP installation
- Windows comes up fine - but half my stuff isn't working because the
drive mounted as D:, and it's not finding things it expects on the C:
drive.

Help!
(Please reply to (e-mail address removed) if it's not too much trouble)
Thanks!
 
Redo the clone but after its done boot with only the new drive attached. Making this the only drive
present will give it the C lettering. You shouldn't need to do a repair install if the drive is
only thing changing, just boot with it and let hardware wizard do its thing. It will find the drive
ask for a reboot. After reboot everything should be running OK. You can then shut down and slave
the old drive if you want and format it and repartition within disk management.
 
I have a new ATA drive I've mounted - but the damn thing mounts as a D:
drive - skipping the C: entirely... from what i've read in forums, you
can't just change the drive letter since the D: lettering gets
hard-wired into the registry after XP's installation. I don't mind
re-installing XP, but how do I assure that the drive will mount as C:
and not pick it's own drive letter? Looking for a listing of steps
that I can follow to assure it mounts as C:

Little background:
- Used Norton Ghost to clone IDE drive (which I want to replace with
the ATA drive)
- Used my XP install disc to repair the XP installation
- Windows comes up fine - but half my stuff isn't working because the
drive mounted as D:, and it's not finding things it expects on the C:
drive.

Help!
(Please reply to (e-mail address removed) if it's not too much trouble)
Thanks!
Click to expand...


mcintoshdrew:
I would guess that after you cloned your old HDD to the new one you failed
to disconnect the source (your old) HDD and make that *initial* boot *only*
with the destination (the newly-cloned) HDD connected, i.e., you made that
initial boot with both the source & destination drives connected. Does that
sound like what might have happened?

I'm assuming in all this that...
1. Your old HDD was assigned the C: drive letter, booted without incident,
and functioned without any problems, and,
2. The only two storage devices connected during the disk-cloning operation
was the source & destination drives. That's right, isn't it?
Anna
 
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