There might be a very easy solution to this one or none at all, save for re-installing XP, so here's the situation and my question:

I recently installed XP to a second hard drive while booted up to my primary drive, with the expectation of removing the primary drive as soon as I got XP installed on the secondary. There was a good reason for doing it this way, but there's no need to go into those details. I had never actually done this before though, I had always done my XP installs to a single drive after booting directly from the CD. As a result, I discovered that when I installed XP on the second drive, it assigned the first available drive letter to the primary partition that was available (in this case H.

Having never done an install quite like this, I assumed that when I removed the primary drive as intended after the installation, that the new drive would assume the letter of C: (a throwback to my experiences with previous OS versions). That was not the case, the system retained the drive letter that was available when I installed the OS while booted from another drive. This REALLY bugs me, I do not want H: to be the drive letter of my primary drive for a variety of reasons. Suffice to say I REALLY want the drive letter to be C:.

So I hooked the primary drive back up, making the newly installed drive the secondary again, and tried to change the H: drive letter to C:. Of course the only way to do that would be to change the drive letter of the active partition from the current primary drive to something other than C: so that C: would be available, but XP will naturally not let you do that. It does not let you change the drive letter of an "Active or System partition".

So, short of reinstalling the OS and ALL the drivers again from scratch, I know of no way to change the drive letter of the primary partition to C: from H:. I have not installed any 3rd party software that would have created hard coded references to the H: drive so that's not an issue, I've only installed XP Pro and all of the necessary system drivers, and dumped some data on the new drive such as my MP3 collection etc. To be honest, having my primary partition as H: irks me so much, that I will almost certainly reinstall the OS and all the drivers if that's what I have to do. But that's about a 3 hour job and a big hassle for me, when all I want to do is change a friggin drive letter.

If anyone knows of an easy reliable way to do this I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance!