Hi,

I have no idea how this happened but after installing XP on my machine which has one extra internal drive as well an external USB drive, I noticed that the system drive was not labelled drive letter C: but E:. So far I haven't run into any significant problems except on the occasional install it will automatically look for a C: drive to put the files but I just have to change it manually.

1) Are there any other potential problems I may run into with this configuration? Is there something unique about drive letter C: or is it just an arbitrary default?

2) Any guesses on what I did to get my system drive set to E: anyway?

3) Is there any way to change the drive letter of my system drive? I tried Disk Management but it doesn't allow it.

Thanks!

Lynn

Wow, that deserves a pat on the back! How the hell???!!!

The only way I can think of you managing this is
1) You edited the default install path of Windows to the E drive somehow.
2) You had 2 NTFS partitions earlier on your internal drive to shove this one (possible FAT32) out to E. Or the latter one was the one set active.

What are C & D? Can you move these to (say) H & I & then try moving E to C? If it doesn't cause you much trouble, there's no real point in trying to fix it. I think only a reinstall would fix it.

Great way of confusing people tho!

GF

I've done a hundred Windows OS installs, so I'm really at a loss. You just click through defaults and it gives you C:, right? Or so I thought. I'm too far along in this build to start over (a ghost image would reassign the same drive letters, correct?), but I don't want something to go wrong if Windows is *supposed* to look for a C: drive. I can't say I've ever seen a computer that didn't have its system drive labelled as C:.

To answer your questions, I don't have a C: drive at all. X and Y and Z (assigned by me) but C: wasn't given to any drive by Windows. D: is my CD drive.

And it was a brand new hard drive so it had no partitions.

I found this article:
http://www.petri.co.il/change_system_drive_letter_in_windows_xp.htm
The article doesn't seem very encouraging about doing this, unless something's gone wrong. My situation is different because I started out with an E: drive, it didn't suddenly get change to that after the installation.

I guess I'll just stay with an E: drive if it doesn't hurt.

Yeah, ghosting it won't make any differ, this is more a reg thing. C is always the default when installing - or so I thought. I know of certain archaic 16bit software that really doesn't like when C is not there, but most should be happy anywhere.

You could ghost it, then try the step in that link you gave. If you've installed a lot of stuff on this partition, you probably will have difficulties, but you never know! A search & replace of the reg?

Also, for curiousity sake, try rerunning the Windows install & just get to the part where it asks you where to install Windows. I'd love to see where it thinks it's going!

On doing more research, I found that Disk Manager won't let you change the drive letter which contains the virtual swap file, pagefile.sys. So if you move this a different partition, Disk Manager might then let you change E to C (and does all the reg changing for you). Not guaranteed tho.

I'm sure you found these already, but here's something that may be relevant should others have this problem:
support.microsoft.com Zip drives can screw things up like this.
GF

That MS article states this problem doesn't harm your computer, so I'm going to just leave things be. "E:" just doesn't have the same ring that "C:" does...but that's probably just a matter of a habit of the mind.

Perhaps I will try Disk Management again, because I think the first time I tried that and it wouldn't let me change it, I didn't have my swap file on another drive. I do now. I'll let you know what happens.

thanks

Had same problem after fitting new HDD except I got drive I: as system drive - found cause to be HDD was set to Cable Select not Master. Does no harm to system as all software installs correctly.

My son has just had the same problem. In his case it was because he had a USB memory stick plugged in when the letters of drives were being assigned. So now the USB stick is C: and the system rive is E:
So it looks like he is stuck with it, but it is reassuring to know it isn't going to be troublesome, just a bit quirky.
This thread has been very helpful, thanks everyone. :-)

I just put together a new Athlon64 system and just set it up at first with 2 SATA drives. Since there was no IDE hard drive, Windows set my memory card reader to drives C, D, E , and F. The Windows boot drive got set to H. I tried to change it with Disk Management, but you can't change the drive letter of the boot. Oh well, right!?

You won't believe this, but it caused me all kinds of problems! I couldn't get the nForce chipset drivers to install! So I dl'd them from nvidia.com onto my keychain USB drive and got a new error message that there wasn't enough space on C. When I inserted the USB drive, it was assigned to C since I had changed the card reader drives. I changed one of my partitions to C and the chipset drivers installed. They put a bunch of crap on that C partition though. Now that I had a C drive, the Gigabyte CD that came with the mb started to work except it started putting system files on the wrong (C) partition instead of H.

I'm pulling the plug and reinstalling with the memory card reader out so that the system drive is C. I can't believe in 2005 there would be programmers so braindead that they would hard code the system drive as C!!! Especially nvidia!!