Is it normal when installing Windows 7 that it installs itself on 'C' Drive and moves XP from 'C' Drive to 'D' Drive even though it appeared to be installing on 'D' during installation?
sing the same disk drive letters for more than three years. Suddenly the other day, when I started the computer many of the disk drive letters had changed. I used Computer Management to change them back to where they were but when I rebooted the computer, they had changed back to where they were before I made the changes
On my taskbar are five removable drives labelled H,W,X,Y and Z. I have no idea what storage device each of these drives is referring to. I would like to use the letter H to label a HDD. When I open disk management however (my computer>manage>disk management) none of the removable drives are shown.I have tried reading an assortment of USB sticks, phones and mp3 players but none of them show up as H. How can I change the drive letter of a removable drive?
Intel Core i7 CPU 950@3.07GHz 3.81GHz 12Gb RAM ATI Radeon HD 5770 Monitor 1 - BenQ2400W (Landscape) Monitor 2 - BenQ2400W (Portrait) Win 7 Pro 64bit: Epson Stylus Photo R1900.
On my taskbar are five removable drives labelled H,W,X,Y and Z. I have no idea what storage device each of these drives is referring to. I would like to use the letter H to label a HDD. When I open disk management however (my computer>manage>disk management) none of the removable drives are shown.I have tried reading an assortment of USB sticks, phones and mp3 players but none of them show up as H. How can I change the drive letter of a removable drive?
I had Windows installed to the first partition on my drive (which is C:) and after a few years now it's gotten full of software I don't use anymore and the like. Rather than install Windows over it and starting over, I decided to install to another partition and get everything set up before doing away with the old one.
I got Windows installed and mostly everything I use installed and working. My plan was to create an image of this copy and clone it back to the original partition. That was my plan until I realized I had screwed up majorly. The second installation of Windows says it's installed to F: (I'm not sure why, since I thought each version of Windows installed sees itself as C:). Maybe because I started the installation from the other copy of Windows instead of booting straight to the install CD.
Now my question is... Is there any way to make this copy think of the drive it's installed on as C: or will I be stuck cloning it to a drive labeled F:? Thinking about it, it doesn't seem possible considering everything is looking to F: instead of C: on this installation.
Here is an image of my drive setup. C: is the old copy (where I want F: to go) [URL]
I have two HDs; on the first one (80 GBs), I have four partitions, with XP on C: (and this is the boot drive), then D:, E:, and finally Vista on F:. I have another HD, a 1 TB one, which I use for storage, and I have made a lot of partitions on it, generally about 100 GB each. When I ran the setup for 7, I selected a partition on the second drive which was labelled S:. After 7 installed, and I opened My Computer, I saw that everything was messed up, and 7 was now on C:.
I know it doesn't mean it is physically on C:, it is still on the same partition of the second HD where I installed it, but it shows its partition as C:. I used Computer Management to change most of the drive letters so that they appear as they do in XP, but every time I try to change the drive letter of 7 from C: to S:, it gives an error, something about not allowed to change drive letter of system disk which has the pagefile.
So is it at all possible to force change the drive letters so that 7 is shown on S: and XP on C:. I opened C: (the 7 installation) and found many text files in system folders and program files which point to locations on C:, so if I force a change from C: to S:, what happens to all of these - do they automatically change their paths to S:, or does the whole thing just go phut!
I had the same problem when I installed Vista, but I didn't use it all that much, and so I didn't do anything about it, but I like 7, and unlike Vista which everyone said was an intermediate product until the next version came out, 7 is here to stay. I am ready to do another clean install if there is any way around this problem.
I use 3 USB sticks to backup data on a Win 7 machine
-Stick 1 does M,W,F -Stick 2 does Tu + Th -Stick 3 does Sun
I am having problems assigning them all to the same drive letter.I have tried assigning them individually in Disk Management to M: , which happens but as soon as the 2 of the sticks gets removed and put back in they go back to either H or G.I have looked at this thread and the registry fix didnt help either. Drive Letter - Add, Change, or Remove in Windows 7.I need all 3 sticks to be given the drive letter M and to keep it. (obv only 1 stick is in at a time.)
I just installed Win 7, clean install, on a second HD. On the original drive C:, I have Vista, on the new drive with Win 7, drive letter K:. This is all fine if I boot Vista but when I boot Win 7 (I use F12 with Dell) the drive letters are changed. K: becomes C: and C: becomes D:. When I tried to change the drive letters back so C: becomes K:, it will not let me. I spent most of the day setting up to install Win 7.
A few days ago I decided to install windows 7 7100 on my newly built desktop, unfortunately a day later i get an error called 651, i looked around and found out that it is a bug so i am resorting to a more stable os (vista...but only for now) and i am trying to boot it from daemon tools becuz my dvd copy has trouble booting, but every time i try to install it, it keeps trying to install the OS on my system partition and gives me an error that says there is not enough space available.
So my question is, how can i change the default drive letter that windows 7 gives to Daemon Tools?
My C: drive only has 45.4GB TOTAL. While I have two other drives, D(has 2TB) and E(has 500GB). My problem is, everything is installing into C drive automatically. How do I change this?
- I tried switching the drive letters but there's always the "Parameter is incorrect" error(probably because they run the computer).
-Tried going to regedit and editing microsoftwindowscurrentversionprogramfilesdir (also tried editing other files but I attempted to install a program, did not change the installation directory)What do I do? I can't install any program that automatically installs into C drive (for example skype).
i've changed drive letters of my hdd and partitions so that coused loss of user;s files foldr content. before i have done that change there were two partitions - C and D. on parition D were my music, my pictures and my videos content, but after i changed drive letter from D to E all those folders are gone. i can make shortcuts, but i want it to be like it used to be when i have installed Windows 7.
1. My machine has XP on a single hard drive w/ 3 partitions. In order to try Windows 7 the easiest thing for me to do is to install it on my E: partition. If I boot into Windows 7, do the drive letters change around or do the Windows 7 system files still show up as E:WINDOWS?
Are there any downsides to this installation that I don't know about? If I got tired of Windows 7 would it be a problem to get rid of the bootloader?
2. My original plan was to buy a second hard drive, install it by itself, and load Windows 7 onto it. Then reconnect the original hard drive and dual boot by changing the boot order in the BIOS. What does this do to the drive letters?
I would have one hard drive with 3 partitions and another hard drive with one partition. If I boot Windows 7 I'm guessing that its hard drive would become C: and the other hard drive would become D:, E: and F:. But what happens if I boot XP from the other hard drive? Does it stay C:, D: and E: and the second hard drive becomes F:, or do the letter scramble differently?
Well, I did a dual-boot system with Vista 32-bit and 7 64-bit. Now the problem is that, when I'm in Vista, the drive letter of Vista would be C: and 7 would be in B:.
But when I'm in 7, its partition would have the letter C: while Vista would have B:.
Is this normal? What would happen if I installed a program on the path C: in Windows 7?
1) I currently am running Vista on a laptop on which it is the only OS. I want to install 7 on a second partition for dual boot. However, to keep things tidy, I would like to make Windows 7 Drive C: (which currently contains Vista). Is there a way to image the hard drive then reload it onto drive D: after I install 7 on C:?
2) I guess my other option is to install 7 on the formatted HD, then create a D: partition to run the Vista recovery disks on at least that would restore my drivers, etc. But I really wanted to keep my current configuration around for those programs that are slow to catch on to the new OS. (Or do I even have to worry about this?)
3) If all this dual boot stuff is too complicated or if I really don't need to worry about the driver/software compatibility, I might just do away with that idea and clean install it on the C: drive and forget about Vista. (reluctant to do so since I rely on this computer for school). I will be keeping my C: drive image that I took yesterday so taht I can recover to Vista if need be.
Edt: 4) I just had anther thought. If I install Win 7 clean could I then take my Vista hard drive image and make it into a VHD? that would pretty much solve all my troubles I think. Unless I would need to reinstall Vista onto the VHD.
FIX (with SavePart, tried other partition utilities and editing MountedDevices to no avail)
Hope this helps someone else with Wrong Drive Letter Problems
Installed Windows 7 RC and all was well with XP Dual Boot.
After some experimenting(BSD,LINUX,etc), Windows 7 would not boot, so popped in the DVD and let Windows 7 repair the boot.
Windows 7 now booted, but when booting XP on E: , it was now assigned the wrong Drive letter D: and would boot to just before the Logon Prompt and hang(same in safe mode.)
After much research and trial (including editing the HKLM/SYSTEM/MountedDevices hive of the XP install from within Windows 7 to change the drive letter) this was the fix.
This particular XP boots from Partition/Drive E: in Windows.0 directory (yeah, i know, been this way for years)
copied a hard drive using parted magic. I believe i need to edit a boot.ini file? Or was that something for XP? been a while since i upgraded a hard drive so i dont remember exactly what i did last time. Only thing i seem to remember clearly was to NOT plug both drives in once i copied things as windows would have problems with two hard drives, one being the clone of another. So as far as i can tell, everything has been copied. Just need to know what i need to do so windows will actually boot off of it. Not counting changing the boot settings in the bios, which i already did to no effect.
my boot drive leter. recently bought a ssd installed my edition of win7pro 64 onto it no problems except i had my old hdd still plugged in which was my c drive letter ,thus i installed operating system onto my ssd with an e drive letter.ok so i have tried to run a couple of programmes which i use which have failed because the programme is looking for a specific file in c boot directory which i obviously havent got....hope you can understand what im getting at.so big question how do i change my ssd boot drive letter to :c and that all my existing programmes will still work.
I need to move the sata connection for my drive "D" on the motherboard, however after moving it Windows 7 won't boot.
Gateway LX6820, 8GB Ram Windows 7 HOMEPREMIUM 64 bit Drive "C"- Intel X25V SATA SSD 40GB, has 200MB System Partiton for MBR and the rest is for the OS Drive "D"- WD Raptor SATA 150GB, has User folders, Program Data, and Programs installed
I have a fresh install of Windows 7 HOMEPREMIUM 64 bit that was done with drive "D" in one of the hotswap bays. All my tweaks, and settings changes are done and Windows operates with no problems. Now I wan't to move the drive to an internal bay. The set up and install was done using sata 4 on the motherboard but due to cable routing I need to use sata 2 for the move.
After the physical move and cable change Windows sees the Raptor as drive "E" not "D", it can't access the user profile and loads a default profile instead. This default profile won't allow access to disk management so I can change the drive letter. I have tried using Diskpart to reassign the drive letters but when I boot into Windows it changes it back to "E" again (must be due to the sata port 2 being assign "E" in an earlier configuration?). I tried using Windows repair but it changes the boot sector to"C", the "C" drive to "D" and the Raptor to "E", had to change the cables to the original locations and do a system restore to fix that one.
I need to move the sata connection for my drive "D" on the motherboard, however after moving it Windows 7 won't boot.
Gateway LX6820, 8GB Ram Windows 7 HOMEPREMIUM 64 bit Drive "C"- Intel X25V SATA SSD 40GB, has 200MB System Partiton for MBR and the rest is for the OS Drive "D"- WD Raptor SATA 150GB, has User folders, Program Data, and Programs installed
I have a fresh install of Windows 7 HOMEPREMIUM 64 bit that was done with drive "D" in one of the hotswap bays. All my tweaks, and settings changes are done and Windows operates with no problems. Now I wan't to move the drive to an internal bay. The set up and install was done using sata 4 on the motherboard but due to cable routing I need to use sata 2 for the move. After the physical move and cable change Windows sees the Raptor as drive "E" not "D", it can't access the user profile and loads a default profile instead. This default profile won't allow access to disk management so I can change the drive letter. I have tried using Diskpart to reassign the drive letters but when I boot into Windows it changes it back to "E" again (must be due to the sata port 2 being assign "E" in an earlier configuration?). I tried using Windows repair but it changes the boot sector to"C", the "C" drive to "D" and the Raptor to "E", had to change the cables to the original locations and do a system restore to fix that one.
It came with 2 primary partitions: a 650 gb C drive (boot) and a 50 gb D drive (recover). Because the windows partition tool didn't let me reduce the partition size by more than 50%, I decided to use EaseUS partition master to do that. I made D drive logical and renamed it to F, made the C drive 200 gb and made a new 400 gb logical drive and named it D. Then I restarted the laptop and let the tool do its work. After this, the problem started. I couldn't get past the bios screen, and couldn't even tap F2 and F8 to get in the boot menu. When I inserted my windows 7 recovery dvd, I heard the dvd drive working, but nothing happened. When I plugged in a usb drive, however, the laptop loaded the cd drive and I could reinstall windows 7 from the cd. Windows works now, actually, even my old windows installation still works, but I still can't boot up without inserting the usb drive first.
Before I even go further: yes, the "hide empty drives" has been unchecked)I had to reinstall my machine and I was able to to see the drive letters for the internal flash card reader. However I think something might have gone wrong when I give my external HDD a drive letter that was held by one of the flash card reader).I wrote "I think" because I am not really sure since I never wanted to use the internal card reader till today so I never noticed there was an issue. Anyway, the internal card reader does not show up even when I insert a card in the reader. Basically nothing happens. I have uninstalled the "USB Mass storage device" and it gets installed without any issue but the problem is still there: I can't see the reader. the INTERNAL flash card reader has a USB slot and when I insert a EXTERNAL flash drive, the EXTERNAL flash drive shows up.
Might not be a problem for a lot but I'm beginning to run out of letters for Networking disk drives on Windows systems. Once you start sharing multiple CD / DVD devices and multiple external devices (USB sticks, Ipods etc etc) and have may be 12 - 14 Virtual machines together with a decent TEST Bench set of real machines all up and running in a computer test lab this becomes a real pain.
Isn't it about time to get rid of the C: type nomenclenture (originated way back in the 8 bit Intel 8086 MS DOS days or even before).
Even the UNC system is pretty OK ( amemount) .
I'm not sure what type of change would be needed to the file system but IMO the change is LONG LONG overdue. Why on earth we are still stuck with this system which has been around "Since Pontius was a Pilot" I can't imagine.
It really wouldn't be a major problem to be compatable with earlier systems -- you could easily have a simple internal map say references to C: would be replaced by Mountpoint whenever the I/O was requested. Overhead would be very small.
(In any case it's really time to change the NTFS system -- but that's another topic entirely which would be a bit more complex).
Actually my computer is equipped with a 300GB drive as boot-device with two equal sized partitions on it to alternatively boot either Vista x64 (default at the moment) and Windows 7 x64 alternatively.
It depends on which OS I boot, how both partitions get drive letters assigned:
If I boot into Vista, the Vista partition gets drive letter C:, and the Windows 7 partition gets drive D:
If I boot into Windows 7, that partition gets drive letter C: and Vista will become the D: (Just switching)
But now I start to use EasyBCD 2.0, the Beta version, in Windows 7: After updating from Windows 7 Build 7100 to 7229 it shows me booting Vista from drive D: and Windows 7 from drive C:
Before I did the update, the regular EasyBCD 1.72 shows when Vista is booted, to boot Vista from drive C: and Windows 7 from drive D:
Is there anywhere out there a simple description on how the drive letters of startable devices are allocated?
I have a general question about how windows assigns drive letters. My son has a Dell laptop with Windows 7. First of all, the card reader works fine. However, I thought the drive letter was always fixed for the sd card reader. When he inserts a micro sd card and adapter in the slot, it pops up the windows info box with the header stating Secure Digital Card F:/. All is well. When he inserts a different micro sd card and adapter in the same slot, it pops up the info box with the header Secure Digital Card G:/. I don't understand the different drive letters. These are identical 2gb micro sd cards. The reason I ask is we are writing an application that stores the sd card drive in a local sqlite database upon initialization of the application. If the drive is not consistent it basically messes up our application.
until recently I had a ubuntu/Windows 7 dual boot. i got a laptop with ubuntu so i decided to remove it from my pc. after that i had tremendous problems as grub decided to delete my partition table. anyway i got that fixed.so i have 3 hdd's in my pc. 1x 500gb sata, 1x 500gb ide & 1x 1tb sata. i did a fresh install after my boot problem, everything was fine again until today. i installed windows on drive c: on my 500gb sata hdd. the 1tb sata is for data, the ide will be used as a network hdd.so as i turned on my pc today, it didnt boot and just showed a prompt. so i booted from another drive. to my surprise i got a grub command line despite me uninstalling it and doing a fresh install.anyway i booted into the recovery dvd, did startup repair without sucess. so i looked around cmd to find that now my windows partition got assigned the drive letter.i dont know if i recall correctly but i think my teacher said that Windows 7 can only boot from c:. so i think that this is basically my problem.how do i get drive d: to show up as c: again? please npte that i CANNOT boot into windows
Decided to install Windows 7 Pro today but when the install completed, I noticed my drive letters were out of order.
Previously, my partition drives when running Vista Home Premium were
C: System D: Recovery E: Apps F: Data
Now its automatically changed to
C: System D: Apps E: Data F: Recovery
My HP Recovery partition jumped down the list and changed from D to F and shifted the letters of the other drives as well. I have no idea why it changed on its own as I only installed Windows 7 in drive C. The Recovery drive is the 2nd fullest driver on my HD behind C Drive.
