How to change drive letters?

Dan Neely

I'm not sure offhand, but would advise against doing it until you've got time to reinstall all of your software, and possibly your OS as well. When you rename your HD you'll hose a mess of shortcuts and saved paths. You can fix the start menu without too much pain, but hunting down all the entries in the registry and ini files would be a nightmare. In addition some apps with more paranoid security settings will asume they're not on the same system anymore and demand you provide thier serials again, so have those ready as well.

Marc 0

Well, nothing is installed yet (only windows and some drivers). I once got a program with the installation-cd from the zipdrive, that could change all drive letters. But i lost it :doh: If i reinstall the OS, don't you think windows will make the hard drive I: again? I got some articles from support.microsoft.com, but i also read some stories that the system became unbootable. I keep my fingers crossed... :~

Dan Neely

Windows should fix it's own things when changed (I hope) but I remember doing a drive letter change once not sure if ut was under 98 or 2k, and practically ending up doing a full reinstall afterwards. You might be able to specify drive letters at OS install time, I don't know. I'm assuming you've got a real OS disk. If you're limited to an oem reformat+install factory image abomination all bets are off.

Gitte Bager

Hi Try this out.. http://www.mvps.org/marksxp/WindowsXP/driveltr.php[^]

Marc 0

No, ain't gonna work: Partitions that are marked as (System) such as C: in the 1st picture cannot have their drive letter changed I want to change I: (system drive) to C: Thanks for the effort though! :)

Marc 0

So i did some registry hacking from support.microsoft.com, and rebooted the pc. It got up to the welcome screen, but then it stopped! :(( So i first tried to do some hacking with the install cd, but nothing worked. That way i ended up reinstalling everything. And guess what? The drive letters are all ok now! The hard drive is just plain old C:, instead of some stupid I:. Thank God that i didn't install anything! :rolleyes:

Alexander M

You can find this option in the administrator tools of windows. I think the option is called "computer management" in the english windows version. You will find a disk management page there where you can create/delete/format system partitions. Select one of the partitions (or CD-roms, DVDs, ...) with the right mouse button and you will see an option to assign a new letter to that drive. You can also create more than one letter for a single drive or remove all letters with that option. Don't try it, just do it! ;-)

Marc 0

Thanks for the effort, but the problem was already solved (see 1 post up). In the diskmanagement you can change drive letters, but not of the system partition, and that is what i want to do. But thanks anyway! :cool:

toxcct

you cannot change the letter of the partition where the system is installed... i had the same problem (Windows was supposed to install on C:, but it did on H: just because i had some peripherals connected). i just disconnected the other HDD and reinstalled windows. i think you're not obliged to disconnect the hard disk which contains other partitions ; fdisk might provide a function to de-activate a partition...

TOXCCT >>> GEII power
[toxcct][VisualCalc]

Marc 0

You can change the drive letter of the system partition, but then you will probably fuck windows up. I found an article that showed how to do it. With the help of that article i did some tweaking in the registry. windows started fine, until i clicked on a user, then it hung. maybe i had to change some system variables too, i don't know. Anyhoo, windows got stuck, so i reinstalled windows just like you. I disconnected that stupid cardreader, and everything worked fine! :-D