How do I make my new HDD show as C: and not G: ?

[adamski49]

Help! Just had a replacement HDD fitted coutesy of Dell. Engineer has plugged everything back in USB wise before letting me kick off the XP install.

Now he's long gone (and no contact number) I have the HDD showing as G:\ the DVD/CD-RW showing as F:\ and the USB disk reader showing as C:\, D:\ and E:\

I know when I do the a full restore from my external Maxtor HDD that none of the applications will work as they will all be looking at the C:\ drive

How the feck do I rectify this? Do I have to install XP again with the card reader unplugged?

TIA

Adam

 

[bazzjazz]

Adam,

to change a drive letter, first unplug the card reader and then follow the instructions below:

Go to the Control Panel and click on Computer Management....

Open Computer Management (Local).
In the console tree, click Disk Management.
Where?

Computer Management (Local)
Storage
Disk Management

Right-click a partition, logical drive, or volume, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.
Do one of the following:
To assign a drive letter, click Add, click the drive letter you want to use, and then click OK.
To modify a drive letter, click it, click Change, click the drive letter you want to use, and then click OK.
To remove a drive letter, click it, and then click Remove.
Important

Be careful when making drive-letter assignments because many MS-DOS and Windows programs make references to a specific drive letter. For example, the path environment variable shows specific drive letters in conjunction with program names.
Notes

To open Computer Management, click Start, and then click Control Panel. Click Performance and Maintenance, click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer Management.


This is from Windows help. I have done this successfully before so it should work.

cheers,

Barry

 

[Iain Hogg]

I had a very similar problem recently and this board helped me solve it, so let's hope you get sorted too.

My replies are here

Iain

 

[Dave Hall]

Great BBS this...I was just pondering the same problem...many thanks

 

[Mick_rw]

Help! Just had a replacement HDD fitted coutesy of Dell. Engineer has plugged everything back in USB wise before letting me kick off the XP install.

Now he's long gone (and no contact number) I have the HDD showing as G:\ the DVD/CD-RW showing as F:\ and the USB disk reader showing as C:\, D:\ and E:\

I know when I do the a full restore from my external Maxtor HDD that none of the applications will work as they will all be looking at the C:\ drive

How the feck do I rectify this? Do I have to install XP again with the card reader unplugged?

TIA

Adam

If you installed XP to the G: Drive it will not allow you to change the boot drive from G to C.

 

[adamski49]

Thanks for all the helpful replies people.

I started again by unplugging the card reader and reinstalling XP (got it down to 15 mins on my third attempt) and the second time it worked with the HDD as C:\ and the CD/DVD as D:\ - plug in card reader and hey presto E:, F: and G:

Next problem I encountered was the full system restore from an external Maxtor HDD. This should have returned my PC to 'as was' with all applications, files etc back in place. Less than an hour, reboot and.... aaaaaagh 'System error - Windows cannot start'. A lot of good that was. Fortunately I had also manually copied all my files and settings across and not relied on the backup system alone.

In the end I had to do it the hard way by installing XP, then Norton AV and FW then all the online updates (thank feck for broadband) followed by all my applications, transfer of data, and set up of various applications - 8 hours later I think I'm done.

Computers are great when they're working but a real pain when they're not... I'd still be lost without one though.

Adam