Reassigning Drive Letters

[Overkill]

How do you reassign drive letters? On a second computer, I reinstalled XP, but somehow it put my HD as G: Many programs want to try to install to C: by default but find that there is not enough space since that drive letter was given to my smart card reader. It is causing problems because when I put a disk into my drive, some software thinks that it is not installed since I suppose it is looking for itself on the C: and does not see itself; therefore, it asks to be installed again. Other than that annoying problem, it is not causing too many problems but is there a way to solve this?

Thanks

 

[Leo154]

hmm.. in Control Panel > Admins. Tools > Computer Managment > ... Storage there is a way to change the drive letters , I think.

I remeber Partition Magic 8 had a feature to fix the drive letter issues by actually fixing entries in the registry. Not sure if thats what ur looking for.

 

[Vector_One]

Originally posted by Leo154
I remeber Partition Magic 8 had a feature to fix the drive letter issues by actually fixing entries in the registry. Not sure if thats what ur looking for.

The one in Partition Magic is called Drive Mapper. Doing it under XP's computer management may not work for changing the letter of your system drive. It warns you of this before you do it. And for good reason. Drive Mapper will fix all references to a particular drive letter, so that nothing gets screwed up.

Don't know of any other 3rd party programs that do it.

 

[RogerPhillis]

As mentioned go to Computer management and reassert h/drive letters.
If you have multiple partitions it is useful to temporarily change one set to "X,Y,Z" etc to prevent drive letter interferences then back afterwards,when things have settle down.
Also hardware that interfers with drive letters sequences, can be disabled by right clicking in Device Manager,
Your Smart card Reader etc will realign itself when you "renable" it after the h/drive letter(s) are set in sequence.

 

[kitct]

I have used XPs disk management console to do this w/no prob.But you do need to be careful and plan out ahead,as RogerPhillis has stated.

Right click my computer > left click manage > disk management > right click on the drive or partition > choose "change drive letter and paths".

Nice sig work there Vector.

 

[Vector_One]

Originally posted by kitct
Nice sig work there Vector.

Thanks, Jan.

Right back at ya.

 

[LeeJend]

Good luck trying to reassign C: on an imaged HD using XP's management tool. I spent weeks trying to do it to no avail. I suspect it's tied to the copy protection features so you can't mass load HD's off one copy of windows. Partition Magic 7 didn't handle it either.

Some kind sole posted a link in here to a utility that "fixed" the HD Track 0. Windows had done something to it so the copied drive always showed up as D:

 

[kitct]

An imaged hdd.Mmm...I missed that.lol

Thanks Vector!