Change System Drive Letter?

T4i

Think I've made a boo-boo.

Just upgraded to a AM2 DDRII system.

2 IDE drives (from my old system) and 2 SATA drives (new)

I've installed XP onto my SATA1 and my old IDE1 has kept its letter C: thus giving my SATA1 (new system disk) the letter G:

Can I change the system G: to C:?

Got a feeling I can't change system drive letters?

superscaper

No you can't, only possible way is at setup. When I had that I got so annoyed I did a reinstall, forced it to create a new partition, made sure it was called C: and then installed to that selected partition.

John_Gray

Even if you could change the system drive from G: to C: you would have a fun time changing all the registry entries which pointed to the G: drive back to C:...

Best bet is to disconnect all the drives except the SATA one you want to make the boot/system partition, and reinstall to that.

John

Chippy_Minton

John_Gray wrote:

Best bet is to disconnect all the drives except the SATA one you want to make the boot/system partition, and reinstall to that.

I'm just wondering what would happen once you'd reconnected all the other drives. Maybe the system would try to load Windows from the first hard drive the BIOS finds and fail because Windows isn't installed on that drive.

Or perhaps with the other drives disconnected the BIOS automatically sets the SATA drive as the first drive. If not, the solution is either to change the boot order in the BIOS so that the SATA drive is first, or create a small System Partition on the IDE drive and tell it that the Boot Partition is on the SATA drive.

See Definition of System Partition and Boot Partition.

T4i

Thx for the relpies.

I ended up unpluging all the power connectors apart from SATA1. XP wouldnt let me choose which drice I wanted to install it on.

If theres only one drive plugged it in has to choose that one. Blummin machines!

Very impressed with my new rig though, AM2/DDRII. Now I just gotta sell my old components - oh the joy!

Omertron

I've done it once... but it's a pain and not really worth it. Now I'm used to the system drive being on for my server

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307844

movieman

It's easy to change the drive letters in the registry: however, all the programs you've installed will be looking for their files on G:, so that won't help much unless you reinstall them.

f1charlie

I'm sure that when I installed a Seagate drive a while ago, in their suite of utilities there was one for changing the registry entries for the drive letter - intended for the CD drive changing letter when a second hard disk was installed.

Charlie