Change Drive Letter From One Of Dual Boot Drive
Nov 26, 2009
I have a dual boot system with both having windows xp.When I load into the 1st XP installation, the following is the list and assignment of the drives:
C : Local Disk (contains the 1st XP installation)
D : CD Drive
E : Local Disk (contains data and also few installed program folders)
F : Local Disk (contains the 2nd XP installation)
Initially when I noticed this drive arrangement after setting up the dual boot, I just left it as is, not knowing what to do.But nowadays I am having a lot of problems as the installed programs are not accessible because their target location keeps changing, everytime I keep switching between the two operating systems.How can I solve this problem?Can I do the follwing : Load into the 1st XP installation, and then change the drive letters (of the last three drives) such that they are matching the drive assignment as seen when loading into the 2nd XP installation.Here in a way I have kept the same drive name for both installations.But Will this work?I also have some of the program folders for the 1st xp installation stored in E drive, and after changing it to D drive, will all the links be properly converted upon restart?
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Jul 25, 2005
how can i change the drive letter of my boot volume
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Oct 8, 2008
I recently installed a new hard drive into a friends computer and installed XP Home.
I ran all the updates and service packs.
I left later that day and let him install all his applications.
I got a call tonight from him saying he really screwed up and doesn't know what to do.
I had to follow his thinking over the phone so I hope I get this all correct.
He had trouble loading the drivers for his HP printer. He would get an error saying that a C: empHP_WebRelease folder was missing. He did manage to figure out that for some reason when I installed XP it called the Boot drive "I" instead of "C"
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May 25, 2004
I installed a Serial ATA hard drive. Booted from floppy,partitioned and formatted 120mb HD,with 2 partitions.
Connected my old IDE drive and booted from Norton Ghostdisc, cloned my old drive to the new one. Removed all drives and USB card readers except the new SATA drive. Windows will not fully boot, it halts at the blue Windows intro screen. Restarted Windows, and scandisk ran, but indicated drive letter "H" not "C", so I guess the windows installation is still looking in the original place for it's files, ie. the "C" drive, that's why it won't boot. You cannot change the "System" drive letter from "Computer Management" within XP, and I cannot get into Windows anyway. Is there a "work around" for this, other than a clean install? Even then, is it still going to be drive "H"? And that means another Windows activation. How many goes do you get for activation? I tried a windows repair installation, and reactivation (wasted). Windows then worked, sort of. Lots of things were missing and programs unuseable,as they were looking for their files on "C": so I went back to square 1, put my old drive back in for the moment
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Apr 21, 2009
I just upgraded my "guts" (mobo, ram, cpu) and am trying to get all set up. I installed windows XP on a brand new hard drive on a newly created partition. On the setup screen, it says C: Partition1 [NTFS] I left some unpartitioned space on the new drive for a later win xp 64bit version install and I also have another HD that is listed as D: Partition1. After the install, my system disk drive letter was F: and my other HD letter was E: I go to disk management and I can change my second HD letter but it won't let me change my system drive letter back to C:. How do I get my system drive letter back to C:?
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Aug 26, 2007
i reformatted my windows partition to try and solve a constant crash problem.my hd is divided up into 2 partitions with the second being where i stored all my data and mp3's.I only formatted the windows partition and now my second partition is inaccessable.The drive letter has also changed from k to d..i tried changing the drive letter back to k and the partition was still inacessable.Any help would be awsome on this.I would hate to lose 100+ gigs of data
D: is not acessable
the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable
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May 24, 2010
I have 2 drives, one with Windows and such, and the other with about 1,000 games that my girlfriend plays. She let her grandson on, unsupervised, and the next thing is a trashed system drive. Unfortunately, there was no way to save it, so I did a format and clean reinstall of XP Home. Goback was on the drive, and there was no way to uninstall it before the reinstall. The reinstall went fine, but the GAME drive is virtually inaccessible. It doesn't show in My Computer, but does show in Admin Tools, Disk Management. However, the drive name is shown as F(F. It should either be D: or F: ( there are 2 optical drives). I can't change the name or drive letter. I get the error "the drive is locked".
I tried Partition Magic, and it will change the info, temporarily. Also, PM shows the drive as *.F It doesn't give any error message, and says the change has been applied, but it obviously hasn't. I searched this forum for "hard drive locked" and followed suggestions that I had not tried previously. The smiley replaced a colon; the entry should read F(F. Sometimes I think I might know what I'm doing, and then I realize, maybe not.
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Jul 5, 2008
Just installed windows xp and I have an atapi zip drive that was assigned as c: and my hard drive was assigned as e:. Is there a way to change the drive letter of my hard drive to C: without reinstalling XP or damaging anything or is having the hard drive as E: harmless:
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Nov 28, 2005
Running win-xp-he-sp2 OS. I want to change the Drive Letter for my hard disk #2, but the Change Drive Letter is grayed-out; in fact, this is true for all the drives listed. How do I correct this problem?
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Dec 3, 2006
I was doing a new installation of XP home on a new hard drive, XP formatted the drive as F: and installed the boot sector there because a thumb drive was in the usb port (which it recognized as C:). I wasn't paying that close of attention and I didn't realize XP would see that thumb drive as C:. My question: is there any way to change the boot letter back to C: without reformatting the hard drive?
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Jan 22, 2006
I bought a computer for my wife and kids. Well months go by and my wife tries to install something and notices that the MAIN drive is H: not C:
I figured that it was weird but no big deal. Well I purchased a printer for her and while trying to install the software it was giving me a "Windows - No Disk in Drive" error.
I did some research and spoke to HP tech support and they suggested that I search the web for a way to change the drive letters from H: (current hard drive) to C: (supposed to be default drive)
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Jun 23, 2010
I reformatted a crappy gate way which has a recovery partition, but it would not reformat the rigth way, when i went to set up windows, Push the next button, i big white box went over everything and that was that, i reformatted 3 times and it kept doing it, so i got a winxp pro disk and did it this way, everything works geat, but now, that damn partition is taking my drive letter C, and i have already read the thing from microsoft about regedit, i did it and i could not load windows, it froze after Loadined winxp, mouse moved but nothing happend, i reformatted again... still taking my drive letter.. please help, if i have to reformat one more time, i wish for it to be the last, and my drive letters to be right.. HELP!! THANKS
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Jan 12, 2009
I'm trying to dual boot 2 different installs of xp pro from 2 drives using the Windows boot loader. I've edited the boot.ini every possible way I can think of, but nothing works. I've done this plenty of times using a linux boot loader or dual booting from a single drive but I cant figure this out. I haven't been able to find any reference to this subject anywhere, but I think it would work. Anybody have a clue as to how to do this? I know I can use a different boot manager to accomplish this, I just wanted to make the Win boot.ini work. Or, does anybody know of a good boot manager if I cant make this work?
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Jan 3, 2006
I have Windows XP Home Edition, SP2 on two separate bootable hard drives in my Dell XPS B1000r. I have my 80 GB �main� hard drive and a 40 GB �extra� hard drive. I mainly boot from my �main� 80 GB hard drive, and that�s the drive that won�t boot after I changed the drive letter.
I wanted to rename the Drive letters associated with each of these hard drives. I was able to change the �extra� hard drive using the Disk Management option. I was not able to change the letter of my �main� hard drive, because I booted from it. I used Regedit to change the boot drive letter, based on the Microsoft Help & Support article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...;EN-US;Q223188
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Aug 3, 2005
My office has a number of mapped network drives for each user which, unfortunately, start at drive letter F.Each time a USB device is used on the computer it is also automatically assigned the drive letter F (presuming that C is hard disk and D and E are CD/DVD drives). This has to be manually changed from within Disk Management.Apparently this is as a result of physical drives taking precedent over the mapped network drives.Is there any workaround for this other than moving the mapped drive letters further along in the alphabet? - this is not really a feasible solution at this time.
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Jul 31, 2005
I had to reinstall XP because of spyware issues. I saved important data on my slave drive. I reinstalled XP. Now the bios, device manager, and disk manager recognizes the slave drive but didn't assign it a drive letter. In disk manager it shows as a basic disk, NTFS, Healthy (Active), 18.65 GB,Online. When I right click the volume to assign a drive letter it is grayed out.
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May 29, 2006
After reformating my pc, my secondary hard drive is now designated as drive "D". Before the reformat it was drive "G". I have software that needs to get data from drive "G" but the drive is not designated as "G" any longer. I can't remember how to reassign the drive letters so that I can designate the secondary drive as "G".
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Nov 22, 2009
I have just bought and installed (to the point of completing initialization under Disk Management) a new 1 TB hard drive. Originally, I was planning to use it solely for data storage.However, I am thinking of installing Windows XP Pro and all the programs I currently use on it, thereby making it the new OS and programs drive, while using the original 120 GB HD as a data/backup drive.I think the main appeal of doing this, for me, is that it also presents an opportunity to reinstall Windows on a machine which hasn't had this done for more than three years, and which currently seems to take at least five minutes to boot to a "usable" state, despite having a reasonably high spec for its age (it was bought in 2001, but as a result of the upgrade
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Sep 6, 2008
My external drive has always been "E" and I have several desktop shortcuts that relate. Recently I inserted a flash drive containing home movies and after viewing and a reboot later I noticed that my external drive is now shown as "New Volume F". I would like to change it back to "E"
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Jan 23, 2007
A laptop has 5 mapped drives which are only used on the office. Offline files is not an option. When a user on the road clicks on a mapped drive by mistake, the explorer window locks up while it tries to find it.
Instead of doing something sensible like taking the explorer window to C: drive or desktop, it goes to the next drive letter. Of course this is also unavailable. So the machine is essentially unusable for about 5 minutes if the user mis-clicks once.
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Feb 3, 2008
not being computer literate , i am having a problem with a new hard drive . i took out the old one . i have the windows disc and product codes , but i can't get it to boot to start the windows installation. i have done it on another computer , and the disc begins installing windows on start up. i have tried starting the computer with the disc in place , and without it . obviously , i must be missing something to get it started . the disc is brand new .
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Jul 14, 2005
On our WinXP systems (SP1 & 2), when users attempt to us usb flash drives, sometimes the O/S tries to assign an already used network drive letter to the device, making it unaccessible. Of course, the non-admin users can't use drive manager to change the drive letter. Is their a way around this problem?
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Dec 7, 2005
Problem is after reinstalling xp on a new hard drive my second drive only shows up in disk management does not show up in my computer .It has all my stuff on it from my old drive so really need teh info on it badly.But under disc manmgement where it shows up healthy with no drive letter everything is blanked out except delete partition.
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Feb 19, 2009
Win XP Pro, USB 1.1 in front, 2.0 card added to PCI slot.I can put in a jump drive or a flash memory card reader and hear the XP bong, it does the new software found and says it's available, but It does not show on 'my computer'.I can go to manage, disk drives, and see it. I can right click and assign a drive letter, but still does not appear on 'my computer'.I can still open it after assigning a drive letter in 'manage' and read/write files from a new window.I'm suspecting BIOS? It was a machine I upgraded to XP Pro.
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Mar 8, 2006
I have a dual boot system (2 hard drives) booting Suse and XP and boot up through Suse's built in boot manager which gives me the option of booting to Windows or Linux. But since I barely ever use Linux I want to delete it off the 2nd drive so I can use it for a storage drive, so I'm wondering how to replace the Windows Master Boot Record so I can just boot into my XP drive. I'm scared that once I delete/reformat the contents of the 2nd hard drive (I'll probably use Partition Magic to do this through my XP drive) that I won't be able to boot XP up anymore. So before I do anything I want to just be able to boot into XP and bypass the linux drive before I delete it to make sure everything is ok.
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Feb 5, 2007
I will be formatting my drive now and I want to install XP and Vista so that I can choose which one to load at the start of booting up. How would I do this? Do I need to create two partitions, install both operating systems on the separate drives and then done? Or is there more to it? Which operating system should I install first, if there is any difference
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Jun 8, 2005
I have two hard drives, both of them with Win 2000 Pro. The First has been the master in machine one from the start. The second HDD has been in machine twoand that machine has crashed so bad that it is not worth the time, energy or money to fix it. This second HDD has important data on it that is only accessable through older programs that are only on this drive. (It is a church membership data base program and a church financial record program) I have the added problem that no one in the office has a clue where the install disk are for these programs and they are not where they are suppose to be (this was before my time). I would like to place the second HDD in the first machine and set up a dual boot so the user can choose which drive to operate from. There is the added problem that the computers only have a restore disk that came from Dell and not a full Win 2000 Pro CD.
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Jan 12, 2008
I have a computer in which I have an XP dual boot on 2 separate hard drives (160 & 120 GB).I have had this particular combination in working order since 4/07. A few days ago my 2nd drive (F) would not boot. I get only a blank, black screen and nothing else NO error messages or warnings. My C drive will boot normally, no problems.The drive is "seen" in BIOS, startup and in my computer on the C drive. The drive is there but the darned thing just will not boot. I have tried using "fixboot" & "fixmbr" to no avail!
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Apr 3, 2007
I have successfully cloned my primary c partition of a dual boot system with XP Pro on the 1st primary partition c: and XP Pro on the 2nd primary partition as d: I can boot into my XP on the c: drive with no problem, but when I attempt to boot into my XP on the D drive it hangs on the blue screen right before booting into the user profiles. And believe it or not it continuously loops making the windows startup sound and the shutdown sound. It does the same in safe mode. I will try to explain the process on what I did so it can help you experts figure out this dilemma that I'm having. My old drive an IDE 100GB IBM primary drive was partitioned into 3 parts:
c: 30GB FAT32 primary
d: 30GB FAT32 "
e: 30gb FAT32 "
All ran great in XP's on c: ,D: and :e except that i was running out of room in all the partitions and the drive is getting very old , I think (5yrs). I used XXClone Pro v.0.58.0 to clone my old c: and d: partitions to a WD IDE 160GB. I tried many other cloning proggys like Acronis True Image, Drive Clone, Paragon Drive Copy, Drive Image 2002, HDClone 3.1 Pro but they all either changed my new drive NTFS file system to FAT32 or made exact same size copies. I formatted and partitioned my new drive as follows:..............
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Jul 26, 2005
Can anybody point me to the instructions about how to install XP Pro to a single Win98 hard drive - to make it dual boot, like Win 2k? I've been looking all around the internet and the only thing I've found is an XP dual boot on a 2nd hard drive.
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Feb 22, 2007
I have Windows XP home edition already installed on my system and I for some reasons I want to reinstall them on a different hard drive (I have 2 IDE drives). It is very important that my initial windows setup, the one I am running on now, will be working after the new installation too. Is that possible?
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