Changing Hard Drive letter

  • Thread starter Thread starter Slartibartfast
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Slartibartfast

Out of ignorance, when I installed XP on a new hard drive, I left my
internal Zip drive connected.

XP in its wisdom decided that the Zip Drive should be c:, and the Hard Drive
should be f:

It's impossible to use the normal Windows facility for changing the letter
of the Hard Drive, although you can change the letter of everything else,
but I was wondering whether any freeware exists which might do the job.
 
Out of ignorance, when I installed XP on a new hard drive, I left my
internal Zip drive connected.

XP in its wisdom decided that the Zip Drive should be c:, and the Hard
Drive
should be f:

It's impossible to use the normal Windows facility for changing the
letter
of the Hard Drive, although you can change the letter of everything else,
but I was wondering whether any freeware exists which might do the job.
Click to expand...

Go to:
Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk
managment > Right click on drive > Change drive letter

If there is no letter add one!
OK?
 
Ziher said:
Go to:
Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk
managment > Right click on drive > Change drive letter

If there is no letter add one!
OK?
Click to expand...

That should work fine, as long as the current user is logged in as an
administrator.
 
Don't think so : IMHO windows will refuse to change drive letter it has
assigned to the drive it is installed itself. Any other can as suggested.
But not the system drive !
If you manage to do it : I would be interested in procedure.
 
Don't think so : IMHO windows will refuse to change drive letter
it has assigned to the drive it is installed itself. Any other can
as suggested. But not the system drive !
If you manage to do it : I would be interested in procedure.
Click to expand...

Ouch. Can't believe I overlooked that rather large detail.

Even if it's possible, it would create problems if any software
software that has been installed uses absolute paths to the system root
rather than relative ones.

Slartibartfast, I think if you really want the letter changed it would
be better to start all over with the OS install. At least you know
that the answer is 42 now. ;)
 
Don't think so : IMHO windows will refuse to change drive letter
it has assigned to the drive it is installed itself. Any other
can as suggested. But not the system drive !
If you manage to do it : I would be interested in procedure.
Click to expand...


It can be done several ways. This is how I do it.

(1) You need to disconnect all CD/DVD drives and then hide any other
partitions (except for the one you want to boot from). CDhange their
file type to hidden and/or remove reference to them from the master
partition table of the HDD. If you have only one partition on
one hard drive then there is nothing to do here.

(2) Clear the XP signature in the boot sector.

(3) Boot with only the system partition installed. This will make
it C.

(4) Add all extra devices/partitions.

I would use, er, Bootit to clear the sig but that is not freeware.
See past posts for a good old debate about it! I would guess that
FDISK /MBR from a Win98 bootdisk can effectively clear the sig.
maybe some other freeware can do it too.

Petri and Microsoft (below) appraoch all this by a different
method of deleting XP registry entries used for mapping the
partition(s).

http://www.petri.co.il/change_system_drive_letter_in_windows_xp.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=223188

Doug Knox is not so sure about this approach.
http://www.dougknox.com/tips/xp_drive_letters.htm
 
Ouch. Can't believe I overlooked that rather large detail.

Even if it's possible, it would create problems if any software
software that has been installed uses absolute paths to the system root
rather than relative ones.

Slartibartfast, I think if you really want the letter changed it would
be better to start all over with the OS install. At least you know
that the answer is 42 now. ;)
Click to expand...
As I recall the same situation arose with Win2K and I did as suggested.
Changed the address of the Zip Drive to another address then changed the
address of Win2K to C:.
 
Out of ignorance, when I installed XP on a new hard drive, I left my
internal Zip drive connected.

XP in its wisdom decided that the Zip Drive should be c:, and the Hard Drive
should be f:

It's impossible to use the normal Windows facility for changing the letter
of the Hard Drive, although you can change the letter of everything else,
but I was wondering whether any freeware exists which might do the job.
Click to expand...

No, it cannot be done.
 
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