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Changing drive letter assignments in Windows XP - why so hard???

TARPSBird

TARPSBird

Moderator
Staff member
Changing drive letter assignments in Windows XP - why so hard???

Tomorrow (Monday) if UPS has recovered from New Year's I should be receiving my new 500-gig internal HD. During a recent reinstall of XP some act of God (or Windows) caused my drive letters to be changed. My boot drive which was C:\ (as normal) suddenly became D:\ and my older storage drive (formerly D:\) became C:\.
When I tried to fix it using my Administrator account and the Disk Management utility I was prevented from doing it. My attitude is, this is my freakin' computer and I hate to be denied a function especially when I'm following MS's instructions exactly. :banghead:
Tomorrow, when I format and install the new drive I'm not going to have my old internal storage HD or my external HD connected. Should the new drive designate itself C:\ automatically, or is there some other BS I have to go through???
 
It's a sign... telling you to switch to an OS that isn't 10 years old.

W7 is welcoming you with open arms! :wavey:
 
rename everything but the supposed C drive way off in the alphabet. Then the C drive, then in bios. I've had the same issue several times. It can be a pain in the rear
 
TARPSBird said:
Tomorrow (Monday) if UPS has recovered from New Year's I should be receiving my new 500-gig internal HD. During a recent reinstall of XP some act of God (or Windows) caused my drive letters to be changed. My boot drive which was C:\ (as normal) suddenly became D:\ and my older storage drive (formerly D:\) became C:\.
When I tried to fix it using my Administrator account and the Disk Management utility I was prevented from doing it. My attitude is, this is my freakin' computer and I hate to be denied a function especially when I'm following MS's instructions exactly. :banghead:
Tomorrow, when I format and install the new drive I'm not going to have my old internal storage HD or my external HD connected. Should the new drive designate itself C:\ automatically, or is there some other BS I have to go through???
Click to expand...

The disk Mgmt console in XP was somewhat limited when it came to dealing with Drive Letters for Active Partitions, that is very likely your problem the partition you are attempting to change is Active and it can't be changed with the normal tools. I did have a partition tool that would allow you to do it, if I can find it I'll let you know. The best chance you would have to correct this is to boot with a tool like "The Untimate Boot CD for Windows" which has a couple of good Partition tools, and if you boot from the CD the Internal Drive's are not locked as Active and you should be able to make the changes you need. The one note to remember with this type of change is you will need to have C: avaliable before you start, so if your currently showing C: and D: and want to swap them, change both drives to higher letters, i.e. F: & G:, then "reboot" with the CD. Now you can make which ever drive you want Drive C: and Drive D:.

One tip for you on this Drive Partition stuff, if you have XP Pro you are much better off formatting all drives with the NTFS format, (by default most Externals are formatted FAT32), it is much more flexable and a far superior format for large disks. Also with FAT and FAT32 there is a physical file size limit of 4GB so if you are doing compressed backups and they create a single compressed file you can easily exceed that limit and the backup will fail. If your current drives are FAT or FAT 32 you should seriously consider doinf the conversion to NTFS especially if you are about due for a full OS reinstall anyway, like most of us end up doing from time to time.
 
Mike has it. You can't name it what another has. You must name it something not already taken.
 
OleBoy,
My thinking was, if I install the new HD and then the OS without the other two drives plugged in, the new drive would designate itself C:\ by default. Am I right? Or will I have to make adjustments in the BIOS??? This is an area where I don't have much experience so I need to borrow other people's brains. I'm not ready to upgrade to Windows 7 (sorry Kiwikat) and even if I were I'd still need to get these drives designated correctly.
 
TARPSBird said:
...During a recent reinstall of XP some act of God (or Windows) caused my drive letters to be changed. My boot drive which was C:\ (as normal) suddenly became D:\ and my older storage drive (formerly D:\) became C:\.
Click to expand...

It's probably an Act of Hardware:- your older storage drive was probably connected to the m/b some time before the boot drive and so is on the first HD connection, the boot drive is on the next; so XP just reads the hardware order when reinstalling. Or the BIOS is set to look at the older HD first in the boot order - it looks to see if the older HD is bootable first and if not tries the newer one next.

When I tried to fix it using my Administrator account and the Disk Management utility I was prevented from doing it.
Click to expand...

The guys are spot on. Allocate a letter like J: or K: to the storage drive and you can then change the boot drive from D: to C:

Tomorrow, when I format and install the new drive I'm not going to have my old internal storage HD or my external HD connected. Should the new drive designate itself C:\ automatically, or is there some other BS I have to go through???
Click to expand...

Ordinarily, if the other drives are not connected, reinstalling XP will allocate C: to a solitary HD. But are you going to ditch the XP installation on your existing boot drive? If you're just using the new HD for storage and not the OS, there's no need to start from scratch, just plug the new drive in and use the Disk Management utility to register it with XP.

Whichever choice you make, I'd check the drive which is to be the boot drive is the one the BIOS is set to check first.


And now a salutory tale:-


I recently added a new HD to my rig to replace the Win7 drive which had failed. Originally built with two 500GB drives before Win7 came out, XP was on C: and the second drive was D: So I had:-
  • C: drive - XP Pro
  • D: drive - reserved for Win7
  • E: drive - DVD burner
The D: drive was replaced with a more reliable WD unit but now I had:-
  • C: drive - XP Pro
  • D: drive - DVD burner
  • E: drive - reserved for Win7
- this from just letting XP do whatever it felt right! IIRC I removed the DVD burner from the hardware through Device Manager, reassigned the second HD to D: and a reboot re-detected the DVD burner and assigned E: to it.

I've since reinstalled Win7 on the new D: drive. Win7 sees its drive as C:, the XP drive as D:! :isadizzy:
 
Have you looked on the label of the HD in question? There you find a diagram showing you how to set the jumpers to make that drive either a master or slave drive. Simple.

Whatever drive you want as a master set the jumpers for that and then set the jumpers on the other drives as slaves. I have 4 drives in my computer and have never had a problem setting them to what I want them to be.

Cheers
Pat
 
Take note of what AussieMan is saying. You will also see this in the bios. Best to check the drives physically though to be sure.

I've dealt with this issue more times than I can count. One time the PC boots fine, then the next time, "fail to load OS" at boot up. An easy fix is to hit the "delete" key while booting. Then to hard drive priorities. You should see a list of drives installed. Highlight the very top one and then choose the drive which you know is the "C" drive as the first boot device. Then hit escape to get you out of that area. Next scroll right to "Boot" and hit enter. There is where you will see ALL the drives (cd,dvd, and hard drives) Again, choose the top one and hit "enter" to see all drives. Once again, choose the drive that you know is the "C" drive as the boot drive. Once done, hit F10 to save and exit. It should reboot. If not, hit ESC. and reboot.

I hope this made sense
 
AussieMan said:
Have you looked on the label of the HD in question? There you find a diagram showing you how to set the jumpers to make that drive either a master or slave drive. Simple.
Click to expand...

Should have remembered that :redf:, but if you're using SATA drives it's not a consideration - each drive has its own cable, there's no cable sharing so no master/slave considerations. And very few IDE drives as big as 500GB...
 
Go into the hardware manager. Choose the drive then name it whatever you want provided it's not already used.
Easy................
 
Thanks for the responses and suggestions. :) When I put this computer together last year I set the jumpers on the original HD to "slave" and my new 120Gb HD was the "master" and had XP installed on it (boot drive). It took a phone call to my son in California to figure that out, hehe. There won't be two OS's running on the pooter because I am replacing the 120Gb drive and reinstalling XP on the new 500Gb drive. The original 40Gb HD is formatted for FAT32 and uses the ribbon wire connection (IDE?) from the motherboard, the main drive is NTFS format with SATA connection. I'm gonna go with my original plan to connect the new drive first and see what happens, then connect my older drive and hopefully the drive designations will come out OK. Thanks again, I am smarter about this stuff now than I was before I posted. :salute:
 
I'm reading with interest as I just painfully went through this same thing. I ended up having to shell $$ to people who at length got things set up as I wanted. I too am not much interested in W7. The wife has it and finds it unneccessarily clogged with features and 'themes' she is tired of being assumed she wanted. The exorcism of these fads continues. Best of luck with the upgrade.
 
Aeromed,
So far I've been able to fix (or at least work around) my own computer problems, thanks in a big way to the savvy folks here at SOH who give me guidance when I ask for it. One thing that bothers me about the newer versions of Windows is the annoying "we want to protect you from yourself" security features such as the "Do you want to open this file?" prompt when you click on a jpg or cfg file in a plane download. No, I don't really want to open this file, I'm a moron and just randomly click on stuff to see what happens. :mad: It's bad enough with XP, I can imagine what it's like with Windows 7 after MS has had 10 years to think up more ways to "dumb down" their OS. I'd still be using ME if I didn't need XP to use programs and access web content.
 
TARPSBird said:
...One thing that bothers me about the newer versions of Windows is the annoying "we want to protect you from yourself" security features such as the "Do you want to open this file?" prompt ... It's bad enough with XP, I can imagine what it's like with Windows 7...
Click to expand...

It's Vista I really don't like for that (Muppet Edition 2.0), with Win7 you can turn the paranoia down by degrees. Or do like I do, turn the UAC off!

Yes I know, I know; but it's my pooter...

Hope the HD has arrived, good luck!
 
TARPSbird,
If your unplugging your older drives and installing new, your drive letter will be "C". Once you have installed winders you can plug the old drives back in, id go with internal first to keep your drive letters the same as they were before new. Most hard/drives come with the jumper set at cable select, (Master) just make sure you put the jumper for "D" drive to slave before you reinstall it.

Joe
 
Well, it took two attempts to format my new HD and install Windows XP with the correct drive letter designations but I finally got the pooter back up and running. Biggest puzzle was figuring out why my external HD was causing XP to hang on startup when it worked fine with the old boot drive and the boot order in BIOS was correct. After installing SP2 and SP3 it worked OK - go figure. :banghead: This is all probably old ground for most of you but it was all new to me. Thanks again to everybody who responded to my original post, we covered some good info that could help somebody else. Other than how to tweak boot priority, all that BIOS stuff is still a mystery to me. :d
 
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