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Orion · Tue Oct 01, 2002 12:17 pm

Okay, I'm stupid. I put my new HD in, and left my old HD in as a slave. But when I installed XP Pro it felt it needed to leave my old HD as C and put my new HD as F, even though F was IDE 0 and is where windows was installed.

Anyhow, I tried to use the Disk Manager and it said I can't change the drive letter for my main drive, even though its the ONLY HD in my box now.

Am I gonna have to reformat again?

Tue Oct 01, 2002 12:25 pm

http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... S;Q223188&

henry44 · Tue Oct 01, 2002 2:53 pm

Unless you need to have the drive letters match up for some previous software install, it doesn't matter what the drive letters are.

My boot drive is a scsi raid 0 array that is labeled drive G and the data drive (single IDE) is labeled drive C. This was done by win xp pro during install. I swapped out a small IDE drive that had the OS on it for the raid array. The cd/dvd drives are labeled d,e,h and the zip drive is labeled f. It all works just fine, just took a bit of getting used to.

Orion · Tue Oct 01, 2002 3:36 pm

Well if its not going to break anything. It just seems weird not havine a drive C at all and having a drive F instead...

pattouk2001 · Tue Oct 01, 2002 4:20 pm

Hi there. The only problem I can see your going to have is "self extract" files where you cannot change the letter of the drive that they try to designate to, so therefore, if a self extract file is trying to install itself on Drive C, which obviously doesn't exist, it will complain that there is not enough space on the destination drive or the drive is damaged. I've seen this happen on a system I built and this very same problem occoured, I could not get that Nvidia 30.82 driver self extract file to install at all. Thats all mate, cheers.

Orion · Tue Oct 01, 2002 4:38 pm

Erg, I hadn't thought of that. Eh, I'm just gonna reformat, it won't hurt doing it again.

BTW, is there a best way to reformatting a HD in XP that already has the OS installed?

DiMaestro · Wed Oct 02, 2002 12:09 am

Probably the best way is to do it w/in the installer of XP. Boot off the CD, and it'll allow you do manage the partition table, add/remove partitions and format drives.

Pattouks comments are valid, however most well written software will use proper system pathing vs hard pathing.

mattsteg · Wed Oct 02, 2002 12:19 am

Just add an alias for your drive so it is both C:\ and f:\

Nothing says a drive can't have multiple letters.

Right click on the partition in disk management, chick on change drive letter, and add a new letter if you really want it to be c. Leave f intact so anything that uses f: will not be messed up.

Orion · Wed Oct 02, 2002 2:12 am

Turns out the easiest way to is to just reformat, hehe.

mattsteg · Mon Oct 07, 2002 6:22 pm

To each their own, I see no problem with having my system drive as F though, in fact my system drive was F for awhile.

Orion · Tue Oct 08, 2002 2:07 am

mattsteg wrote:
To each their own, I see no problem with having my system drive as F though, in fact my system drive was F for awhile.

But then its not perfect! All new installs , reconfigures MUST be perfect, hehe.

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My main drive is drive F!

My main drive is drive F!

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