Need to change system drive letter!

[The Slave!]

Here's what happened:

My Win2K system got really corrupted, and wouldn't boot. I
decided it was time to migrate to XP. Removed my old 40GB
drive with Win2k on it, and installed a brand new 60Gb for
a clean install. Placed the drive as the master drive on
the primary IDE port. The other drives still connected on
the machine were a CD-R (slave on primary IDE), 10GB data
drive with NO system files on it (master on secondary
IDE), and a DVD-ROM (slave on secondary IDE).

The installation went very well, and when I final had XP
installed and could look at the system I noticed that the
system disk had been assigned drive letter F:. What
the ...? There were a few system files that had been place
on the data disk that was now assigned the letter C:. On
the old system this drive had been the D: drive, and, as I
already mentioned, had no system files on it at all. So,
what happened, and how can I fix it?

I can't change the letter assigned to the system disk, but
I have changed the drive letter on the data drive. I
copied over what I had on the data drive to my system
drive, and was planning on removing it so I could add the
old Win2K disk and transfer any files I still needed from
it (i.e. old PST files). I'm not sure that is a good idea
until I fix the problem with the system disk.

Is there a way to change the drive letter of the system
disk if XP assigned the wrong letter to it? The data disk
was an NTFS volume, so I don't think that had anything to
do with it. I would hate to have to reinstall the whole
system again with just the new HD installed. Any help
would be really appreciated. I still can't believe this
happened. I've installed Win2K several times with various
disks connected to the PC, and never had anything like
this happen before.

On a side note: I have yet to be able to sucessfully go
through the Windows Update procedure to ensure I have all
the latest updates. It usually hangs on the system scan. I
wonder if this is related to the system drive letter. Any
ideas on this one?

[Mark L. Ferguson]

The reg hack to change the system drive letter is difficult, and sometimes
fails. You would be better off installing it again to the letter of choice, and
using the FASTWiz to recover settings and data.

File & Settings Transfer Wizard:
http://aumha.org/a/fast.htm

HOW TO Edit the Boot.ini File in Windows XP:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q289022



Run the FastWiz, run setup to the new drive, (a dual boot), recover the wiz
settings, remove the old boot.ini entry, restart,and delete the old windows
folders.

Faster, easier, and safer.

--
Mark L. Ferguson TabletPC MVP
Email address : Subject: "QZ" + anything
All email without "QZ" in the subject line will be automatically deleted.
marfer's notes for XP > http://www.geocities.com/marfer_mvp/xp_notes.htm
..

"The Slave!" > wrote in message
...
> Here's what happened:
>
> My Win2K system got really corrupted, and wouldn't boot. I
> decided it was time to migrate to XP. Removed my old 40GB
> drive with Win2k on it, and installed a brand new 60Gb for
> a clean install. Placed the drive as the master drive on
> the primary IDE port. The other drives still connected on
> the machine were a CD-R (slave on primary IDE), 10GB data
> drive with NO system files on it (master on secondary
> IDE), and a DVD-ROM (slave on secondary IDE).
>
> The installation went very well, and when I final had XP
> installed and could look at the system I noticed that the
> system disk had been assigned drive letter F:. What
> the ...? There were a few system files that had been place
> on the data disk that was now assigned the letter C:. On
> the old system this drive had been the D: drive, and, as I
> already mentioned, had no system files on it at all. So,
> what happened, and how can I fix it?
>
> I can't change the letter assigned to the system disk, but
> I have changed the drive letter on the data drive. I
> copied over what I had on the data drive to my system
> drive, and was planning on removing it so I could add the
> old Win2K disk and transfer any files I still needed from
> it (i.e. old PST files). I'm not sure that is a good idea
> until I fix the problem with the system disk.
>
> Is there a way to change the drive letter of the system
> disk if XP assigned the wrong letter to it? The data disk
> was an NTFS volume, so I don't think that had anything to
> do with it. I would hate to have to reinstall the whole
> system again with just the new HD installed. Any help
> would be really appreciated. I still can't believe this
> happened. I've installed Win2K several times with various
> disks connected to the PC, and never had anything like
> this happen before.
>
> On a side note: I have yet to be able to sucessfully go
> through the Windows Update procedure to ensure I have all
> the latest updates. It usually hangs on the system scan. I
> wonder if this is related to the system drive letter. Any
> ideas on this one?