Changing drive letter of System volume under XP

  • Thread starter Thread starter buddhi225
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buddhi225

There might be a very easy solution to this one or none at all, save for
re-installing XP, so here's the situation and my question:

I recently installed XP to a second hard drive while booted up to my
primary drive, with the expectation of removing the primary drive as
soon as I got XP installed on the secondary. There was a good reason
for doing it this way, but there's no need to go into those details. I
had never actually done this before though, I had always done my XP
installs to a single drive after booting directly from the CD. As a
result, I discovered that when I installed XP on the second drive, it
assigned the first available drive letter to the primary partition that
was available (in this case H:).

Having never done an install quite like this, I assumed that when I
removed the primary drive as intended after the installation, that the
new drive would assume the letter of C: (a throwback to my experiences
with previous OS versions). That was not the case, the system retained
the drive letter that was available when I installed the OS while
booted from another drive. This REALLY bugs me, I do not want H: to be
the drive letter of my primary drive for a variety of reasons. Suffice
to say I REALLY want the drive letter to be C:.

So I hooked the primary drive back up, making the newly installed drive
the secondary again, and tried to change the H: drive letter to C:. Of
course the only way to do that would be to change the drive letter of
the active partition from the current primary drive to something other
than C: so that C: would be available, but XP will naturally not let
you do that. It does not let you change the drive letter of an "Active
or System partition".

So, short of reinstalling the OS and ALL the drivers again from
scratch, I know of no way to change the drive letter of the primary
partition to C: from H:. I have not installed any 3rd party software
that would have created hard coded references to the H: drive so that's
not an issue, I've only installed XP Pro and all of the necessary system
drivers, and dumped some data on the new drive such as my MP3 collection
etc. To be honest, having my primary partition as H: irks me so much,
that I will almost certainly reinstall the OS and all the drivers if
that's what I have to do. But that's about a 3 hour job and a big
hassle for me, when all I want to do is change a friggin drive letter.

If anyone knows of an easy reliable way to do this I would greatly
appreciate it. Thanks in advance!
 
buddhi225 said:
There might be a very easy solution to this one or none at all, save for
re-installing XP, so here's the situation and my question:

I recently installed XP to a second hard drive while booted up to my
primary drive, with the expectation of removing the primary drive as
soon as I got XP installed on the secondary. There was a good reason
for doing it this way, but there's no need to go into those details. I
had never actually done this before though, I had always done my XP
installs to a single drive after booting directly from the CD. As a
result, I discovered that when I installed XP on the second drive, it
assigned the first available drive letter to the primary partition that
was available (in this case H:).

Having never done an install quite like this, I assumed that when I
removed the primary drive as intended after the installation, that the
new drive would assume the letter of C: (a throwback to my experiences
with previous OS versions). That was not the case, the system retained
the drive letter that was available when I installed the OS while
booted from another drive. This REALLY bugs me, I do not want H: to be
the drive letter of my primary drive for a variety of reasons. Suffice
to say I REALLY want the drive letter to be C:.

So I hooked the primary drive back up, making the newly installed drive
the secondary again, and tried to change the H: drive letter to C:. Of
course the only way to do that would be to change the drive letter of
the active partition from the current primary drive to something other
than C: so that C: would be available, but XP will naturally not let
you do that. It does not let you change the drive letter of an "Active
or System partition".

So, short of reinstalling the OS and ALL the drivers again from
scratch, I know of no way to change the drive letter of the primary
partition to C: from H:. I have not installed any 3rd party software
that would have created hard coded references to the H: drive so that's
not an issue, I've only installed XP Pro and all of the necessary system
drivers, and dumped some data on the new drive such as my MP3 collection
etc. To be honest, having my primary partition as H: irks me so much,
that I will almost certainly reinstall the OS and all the drivers if
that's what I have to do. But that's about a 3 hour job and a big
hassle for me, when all I want to do is change a friggin drive letter.

If anyone knows of an easy reliable way to do this I would greatly
appreciate it. Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...


No.. there is no way to change the system drive letter other than a
re-install..
 
Mike said:
No.. there is no way to change the system drive letter other than a
re-install..
Click to expand...

I don't see why he didn't just clone (or partition copy) the primary drive
to the new drive in the first place (using ATI or Casper or whatever). He
could still do that though, couldn't he? That would be a lot easier than
doing a complete reinstall.
 
Bill in Co. said:
I don't see why he didn't just clone (or partition copy) the primary drive
to the new drive in the first place (using ATI or Casper or whatever).
He could still do that though, couldn't he? That would be a lot easier
than doing a complete reinstall.
Click to expand...

I believe very much he will have to reinstall.

There will be contents in the registry which will point to H:\Windows.

I mean Windows does use environment variables to point to the system
directory like %windir%. If you could find where they're kept and changed
them... I don't think even the people who worked on programming Windows
would bother though. It would be even more work then simply reinstalling.
But you could potentially learn a lot about Windows if you took this
undertaking.

At least, now you know you can have Windows directory on a drive other than
C: and how to go about doing it. You learned something, so it's not a total
loss.
 
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