Change Drive Letter ??

  • Thread starter Thread starter InOverMyHead
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InOverMyHead

My two physical hdd's are designated by W2K as D Drive (has old Win98 OS -
formatted FAT32) and E Drive (holds W2K OS - formatted NTFS). Is there any
way to change them to C Drive and D Drive?

Under Disk Manager it shows my external firewire drive (was C Drive till I
changed it to H Drive) as Disk0 (Healthy), the D Drive as Disk1 (Healthy -
System), and the E Drive as Disk2 (Healthy - Boot). But when I try to
"Change Drive Letter and Path - Edit" on D or E Drives - it pops up and
says, "Cannot modify the drive letter of your system or boot volume."

So, is there no way to make D and E become C and D?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Bob
 
If I understand you correctly, you wand "D" to become "C" and "E" to become
"D".

My advice ... don't even try it.

Here's a Microsoft KnowledgeBase article pertaining to that:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;223188

Even if you follow that advice to the letter, it ain't gonna work in your
case. You'll wind up with a totally trashed system.

If it's REALLY important to you that the drive letters be C and D, then
backup your data and perform the three "R's" ... Reformat, Repartition and
Reinstall. Make sure you don't have ANY external drives attached when you do
the reinstall.
 
I'll second that.

Colon Terminus said:
If I understand you correctly, you wand "D" to become "C" and "E" to become
"D".

My advice ... don't even try it.

Here's a Microsoft KnowledgeBase article pertaining to that:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;223188

Even if you follow that advice to the letter, it ain't gonna work in your
case. You'll wind up with a totally trashed system.

If it's REALLY important to you that the drive letters be C and D, then
backup your data and perform the three "R's" ... Reformat, Repartition and
Reinstall. Make sure you don't have ANY external drives attached when you do
the reinstall.
Click to expand...
 
Why doesn't action described in KB 223188 work? Sounds very do-able to me.
Unless it means:

1) All my installed/registered programs on E won't work when it becomed
D, because the registry still thinks they are are on E?

2) And - should I expect all shortcuts to programs on old E Drive to not
work after it becomes D drive? If so, that would not be impossible to
change.

But I would NOT want to run into (1) above.

Any thots would be helpful, and informative.

Bob
 
Why doesn't action described in KB 223188 work? Sounds very do-able to
me.
Click to expand...

Coming in late, but consdier the following situation:
A Floppy
C HDD D CD
E ANOTHER HDD
F ZIP


Say you want to arrange your letters so that C and D are the HDDs. More
"Logical"

Like SO

A Floppy
C HDD
D ANOTHER HDD
E ZIP
F CD


You Cannot Simply change Drive E to D. Why? D is taken (CD).
What To Do: Rename D to an availible Letter (Lets say 'T' for Temp)
and THEN Rename E to D. Follow this procedure to accomplish the remaining
swaps.

You Should be FINE. The only worry is that registry entries may not be
updated properly.
 
If you want
1) An operating computer and
2) The drive letters in the desired arrangement

The ONLY answer is
FOLLOW the recommendation by "CT", anything else is a shortcut to disaster.
 
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