Hardrive Names

[Not Bman]

I had 2 80GB hard drives in my system. 1 had XP installed on it, and one was storage. I formated the xp one, and kept the storage as it was. I installed my new 500Gb hard drive and installed xp on it. I get into windows and the 2 80 gb drives are how they were, C: and D: and my new 500GB one is G: at the bottom of the list. How would I make the 500GB G: into C:?

I will be formatting the 2 80GB ones and probably setting up a raid with them. If that helps.

 

[Not Bman]

I tried changing the SATA cables to have the 500GB use the orignal xp 80Gb SATA cable and it either gives me boot disk failure, or talks about hal.dll is corrupted?

How do I fix this?

 

[epk]

well.. in windows xp the c letter is assigned to the boot partition... i dont think u should change it

 

[kcnychief]

If I'm understanding this correctly, you may need to re-install XP on the 500GB drive with no other physical disks connected. XP doesn't let you change the drive letter on boot volumes, and eventhough it is currently set to G it is still your boot volume. I'm assuming you want the 80's for their data before baking them, so take them out, re-install XP with that 500 being the only drive connected and then plug them in after the fact.

There may be an easier way, but I'm not sure of it atm.

 

[Heeter]

Do like KC says.

remove the 80 and reinstall XP on 500 by itself.

I have tried software like PartitionMagic to correct similar situations like this, but it never worked properly. It also took longer to watch the software fail at the end anyways, than just reinstalling XP.

Heeter

 

[Not Bman]

If I'm understanding this correctly, you may need to re-install XP on the 500GB drive with no other physical disks connected. XP doesn't let you change the drive letter on boot volumes, and eventhough it is currently set to G it is still your boot volume. I'm assuming you want the 80's for their data before baking them, so take them out, re-install XP with that 500 being the only drive connected and then plug them in after the fact.

There may be an easier way, but I'm not sure of it atm.

That is exactly what I had to do, I removed the 2 80GB from the computer and reformatted and reinstalled xp on the 500GB hard drive and then everything went all right.

Thanks for the help guys!

 

[epk]

mm.. why can't he reinstall xp without taking off the other drives?

choosing to install on the 500gb, of course...

 

[Heeter]

mm.. why can't he reinstall xp without taking off the other drives?

choosing to install on the 500gb, of course...

The install files of XP sometimes, for some inconspicuous reason, will load the boot manager files onto some other partition. I don't know why it chooses that even when I chose the correct partition in the partition manager during install. ( I once installed Xp onto my laser printer buffer memory because I left it plugged in during XP install. Pull the USB cord and XP wouldn't load.)

It very rarely happens, but it does.

I always pull my storage HD power plugs and my USB plugs now during a fresh install of an OS, any OS. I just wanna make sure it is all going to the right place.


Heeter

 

[epk]

oh... hehe.. well, its nice to know

 

[j79zlr]

XP will always put its boot files on the first primary partition of the bootable drive. There are ways to change the boot drive letter without reformatting, but they are very messy.