I installed a larger hdd for a friend. Took the old drive out, put the new one in the same slot, same cables/connectors. The machine includes also a floppy (A:), a zip drive, and a cd burner.

Installed XP. Now the zip drive is C:, the cd burner is D:, and the hdd with the XPinstall (in other words, the boot drive) is E:.

Anyone got any ideas how to make the hdd become C: again? I disconnected all the drives from the machine, etc. but didn't help....
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You're in for fun, you can change almost all the drive letters easily except the root of the operating system, I've had that experience a lot.

So much stuff is written into the bios of windows on install that it's quite difficult to fix that. There is a way:



More associated readings here. Not quite relevant, but in case you try and mess up, that one might help boot again.

But have no fear, as is often the case, you can find likely solutions on expert's exchange. This one will show you how to change system partition drive letter. Remember, this is a risky action.

This is basically a restatement of the MS method. Remember, odds of failure are decent. Here's another one that basically repeats the steps.

Back up system if anything is worth backing up. Note you'll need to change the paging file location too.

I thought it couldn't be done, but I guess it can be, but it's risky. In some cases I suspect windows xp activation might also see this is a major hardware change, maybe not, don't know for sure.

But I've been tripped up by this many times, in fact, this newest box I made I deliberately created only one NTFS or Fat32 partition when I installed windows on it, just so I could see the c:\ as my main drive, no point, I just thought it would be nice to actually have c: as system root for once.

The windows sees it, floppies are a: and b:, those are reserved, but all other disks and windows readable partitions are counted first I think, so if you had 4 partitions when you installed, you'd have c -> [[d,e,f,g] == g:. All other attached drives that window sees natively on install, for example zips etc, will be seen as another hard drive. It's a pain. Of course, in linux, c: is just / no matter where it is. Although it might be say sdb3 or something internally, but you don't see that.

So in general, if you want a c:, install windows on the only windows readable filesystem / partition. Windows ignores linux partitions by the way. My old box had windows on g: because I had 4 partitions on it before I installed windows, formatted that is.

If it's worth it to you to get windows back on system root drive c:, let me know if this works. If it's a new install it's not that big a deal to reinstall with only a single windows partition readable, no zip, then add the stuff back in afterwords and you can give the other drives whatever letter you want, z for zip for example.
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Thanks for info.... but there weren't any other partitions prior to install.... well, that's not true - the old drive was whacked up majorly by some butthead who thought he knew what he was doing (and left only about 4gig of a 20gig drive actually available....) - but that drive was disconnected while I installed the new drive. And I installed XP which did the formatting and I gave it only one partition....

I'll read all that, but sounds like I'm not going there. This machine is a "free labor" deal for a friend, it's working fine, they'll just have to figure out how to only install on E since C won't be available....
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The zip drive is what caused Windows to move to d:, windows looked at it as a partition, a drive, same as it does with a usb memory stick for example.

Why it treated the cd rom as a d: drive I'm not clear on, but that might be the default, I think it is now that I think about it, a,b are floppy, maybe d is cd, so since zip was c, system root had to be e.

One day you will look back on these kinds of problems and laugh, of course, there will be new oddities and annoyances to replace them though.

Windows has always been fairly retarded in terms of their choices, for example, if you read the microsoft drive letter switching article, you might notice that deep in the registry they hide the fact that you are in fact mounting and unmounting drives, that's the only place I've seen that word, it's a unix term and windows always goes to great lengths that it somehow does things fundamentally differently than unix, it's all the same under the covers more or less though, Windows for example used the bsd TCP/IP stack.

So it can be done, but since you're on a freebie job, it's not worth it, since it's not simple or safe, and might end up causing many more headaches than looking at the letter e: for the computer's life will cause. Tell the person she has a special machine, whereas most people only get a c: for windows, she got not a d:, but an e:.

That's two letters higher. Her friends should be jealous, they probably all only have c: - once you clarify this special fact, it should be fine.

And then, once you get a nice stable linux going, you can sigh heavily and tell them that you don't even have any letters at all.
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Well, I COULD have fixed it I decided - and had it been my own machine I would have.... would have required installing another "real" drive (as opposed to the one the dork ****ed up....), installing win98 on that one, wiping EVERYTHING clean, then making sure the zip was out of there before taking the win98 drive out and starting over.

I'll just have to tell them to be sure that when things want to install to C: they change C: to E:.

Thanks!
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In almost all cases, things that install know that the system root is whatever it is, I've done that a lot, the only time I ever saw it be an issue was with an old version of I think mysql, not being on c: was a pain, made the install harder. That's fixed for at least a year. Some really old programs too require a manual change in the config files, lynx for windows. But for normal users, all software I've seen simply checks the system root value I think, it always goes to the right place.

In almost all cases, whether it's c:, e:, w:, or whatever matter only because it looks slightly odd to normal users, but the c: is just a label, it has no real meaning, it could just as well be fred:\ except windows would crash, but it's not anything real, it's just a window's convention, they did it so they wouldn't look like unix, that's the only reason.

Just think:

/floppy
/cdrom
/ [root]

compared to:

a:\
d:\
c:\

and so on. Sort of actually makes sense, no?
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Yes it does, and why on EARTH would we want to do that? *laughing*

The one program they wanted installed so far is a fairly old version of Print Shop - and it won't even install properly out of root - if you try for "Program Files" it chokes and dies.... so it's in E: root instead of C: root - seems to work fine anyway.

I have a flight sim to install once I get it back to their house. We'll see what goes with that, it's a fairly new game he got for Christmas....
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