How to Change Boot Drive Letter

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Reinstalled Win2k in my son's PC after he hopelessly corrupted C:\Win 2K by his fiddlings! Re-formatted the master C: drive (physical drive zero) and then reinstalled from new (Win 2K error msgs wouldn't allow upgrade or repair task). Retained his second physical HDD (D:) with his data. Everything now works fine but the boot drive is F: and I am not allowed to rename it via My Computer/Manage/Disk Management (altho logged in as an Administrator). I was not asked where I wanted to instal Win 2K, and did not choose F:

This bugs me as I have used the C: drive for booting for 20 years and don't like F: as the boot drive even if of no other importance!

Any way I can change it back to C:? As far as I am aware, the boot HDD remains the master and the second HDD is the slave and I haven't changed anything in the BIOS since reinstallation - in case this is relevant.

TIA
 
Miles said:
Reinstalled Win2k in my son's PC after he hopelessly corrupted C:\Win 2K by his fiddlings! Re-formatted the master C: drive (physical drive zero) and then reinstalled from new (Win 2K error msgs wouldn't allow upgrade or repair task). Retained his second physical HDD (D:) with his data. Everything now works fine but the boot drive is F: and I am not allowed to rename it via My Computer/Manage/Disk Management (altho logged in as an Administrator). I was not asked where I wanted to instal Win 2K, and did not choose F:

This bugs me as I have used the C: drive for booting for 20 years and don't like F: as the boot drive even if of no other importance!

Any way I can change it back to C:? As far as I am aware, the boot HDD remains the master and the second HDD is the slave and I haven't changed anything in the BIOS since reinstallation - in case this is relevant.

TIA
Click to expand...

Well, the drive letter is irrelevant, but if it irks you that much, the
one reliable way to do it is blow out everything and start again. The
registry is littered w/ countless references to the boot volume, so it's
not something I would try to tackle. There is a KB article in the MS KB
on how to do it, but I've never tried it.

Feel free and report back if you meet w/ success:

support.microsoft.com

hth
 
Miles said:
Reinstalled Win2k in my son's PC after he hopelessly corrupted
C:\Win 2K by his fiddlings! Re-formatted the master C: drive
(physical drive zero) and then reinstalled from new (Win 2K
error msgs wouldn't allow upgrade or repair task). Retained
his second physical HDD (D:) with his data. Everything now
works fine but the boot drive is F: and I am not allowed to
rename it via My Computer/Manage/Disk Management
(altho logged in as an Administrator). I was not asked
where I wanted to instal Win 2K, and did not choose F:

This bugs me as I have used the C: drive for booting for
20 years and don't like F: as the boot drive even if of no
other importance!

Any way I can change it back to C:? As far as I am aware,
the boot HDD remains the master and the second HDD is
the slave and I haven't changed anything in the BIOS
since reinstallation - in case this is relevant.
Click to expand...

I know how you feel, Miles -- irritating, isn't it? Unfortunately, the
only reliable way is to reinstall, but fortunately this shouldn't be a
big deal if you just did it because you probably don't have a lot of
time invested tweaking it yet. However, this time when you reinstall,
disconnect the slave drive and any zip drives, leaving only the CD drive
and master HDD. By the time you told XP-Setup to create the partition
for the OS, it had already seen other drives visible and had given them
drive letters, so the newly created partition got a drive letter further
down the chain. Don't let it see other drives while you install and the
OS should get assigned as C:.
 
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