Drive Letter - stickie request?

[Mainframeguy]

I know we have had a number of threads (not sure if in legacy or more current) about changing drive letter assignments etc. And I know there can be any variables to account for (IDE, SATA, even external, plus FAT32 and NTFS etc. etc.) but I can't help feeling this would be a good subject for a stickie posted thread?

I am not trying to start such a thread, but I'll certainly chip in my own experience, particularly because I presently have 2 IDE and 1 SATA drives in this rig and whilst I have gone the conventional way and put my MBR and C: partition onto the Master IDE disc I am about to attempt to change that and make my SATA drive the one with the bootable partition (not sure if I will succeed though!).

Anyway, what do others think? Can anyone find or extract information from the various threads I remember with different strategies for this into one thread and if we manage that should it be stickied?

Just a thought.... I know I would appreciate it right now if it was there!

 

[X-Istence]

Changing the other drive letters should be pretty easy, just change the bus they are one .

But your other request, it would seem almost impossible, as windows for it to be able to bootstrap needs all kinds of other crap on the main drive as well, not just a MBR.

It is worth a try, good luck.

 

[emeritus]

Go into the control panel, and select Administartive Tools, then Computer Management. After that opens, select disk management. You can change the drive letters there. You can't change the drive letter of the Boot drive or any drive that has a pagefile on it, otherwise you can change the rest and even the CD/DVD-Rom drive letters. Oh yeah, this is under Windows XP.

 

[j79zlr]

For the record, the bios loads the MBR on the active boot device, which in turn reads NTLDR, which is the bootstrap, that loads the boot.ini, which then loads NTDETECT.COM which loads XP.

There is no need to change where the bootstrap files are located as long as Windows is on the drive you want. Really can't change any of this without reloading windows.

 

[Mainframeguy]

...Really can't change any of this without reloading windows.

this is the key information - AND IT IS AS i oops suspected (sorry for bad caps)

so thanks - reps for you....

 

[Mainframeguy]

hehe - and now I have gone through the required BIOS setups to enable my SATA to become primary and formatted and installed XP there - only problem is I still had the old Windoze on my IDE hard drive as C: !

So now I have two windoze installed - and C: is the IDE disc but cannot be changed because it is a System disc and F: which is the SATA disc and a Boot disc so also cannot be changed

I believe I shall only resolve this by physically unplugging the IDE drives - the question now I am asking is if I need to reformat and install again there or if that alone would be enough to get my SATA drive as the boot AND system drive? Then, once it is I guess I can plug in my old IDE drive and (hopefully) things will not get too confused, or if they are I could reformat that too?