Drive letter assignments in windows XP pro

[Mads]

Hey there,
So i was re-installing windows the other day on a drive that i have partitioned into two, one 20gb and 140gb.
incidentally i have 3 other hard drivs that were connected at that time when i did the install after having delted the partition on the 20gb and then installed windows on it..
when it then finsihed install.. my other partition became drive letter H: which i didn't appreciated, i wanted it to be D:
but in disk managmenet it refuses to change the drive letter stating that it's a system volume and thus can not be changed..
something else i find strange is that the partition i created on my 20gb is listing as a logical drive, and the other partition as a primary partition.

so lastly i was thinking i would just reinstall windows again but have all the other drives disconnected.. however, now it says my 20gb partition should be the D: as it's the second partition on the drive ?

Any ideas for how to fix this without doing a complete reformatting and re-partitioning ?

I just want to have my drives be C: for my 20gb windows partition and D: for my 140gb other partition

Thanks

[Wombat]

A little searching would have dug up this thread:

http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?s=&threadid=40432

[Dr Mordrid]

Anyone consider right-clicking My Computer (2K & XP) and selecting MANAGE? This brings up the Computer Management dialog.

From there you enter Disk Management then select and right-click the drive/partition you want to change. For CD, DVD or removable drives you would select the drive name icon on the far left.

From the context menu select "Change drive letter and path", click the Edit icon and set the drive letter of your choice.

If the drive letter you want is taken, or if you have several to change, it's sometimes helpful to start with the last drive and change it to Z, continuing down the drive list assigning Y, X, W etc. until enough lower letters are open.

Once this has been completed you can now start the permanent reassignments.

Dr. Mordrid

[High_Jumbllama]

This does not work with the system drive. A link on the page that WOmbat linked to explains it all.

[Jammrock]

The system/boot partition's drive letter cannot be changed. If there is an existing Primary partition on a drive when you run Win2k/XP setup, and you use the setup to partition the space you want to install the OS to, it will be created on a extended/logical partition by default. I.E., if there had been 3 primary partition on the drive and you used setup to create the partition for the OS, your system partition would be drive F:.

The only way to fix it is via re-install. You'll either have to delete the other partition or use something like BartPE with MMC/Computer Management installed, delete the logical partition, and then create a new primary partition for the OS. When setting up the OS, do not format the partition, just use the existing space.

Jammrock