xp pro: How to change drive letter

[tw1112]

Hi, I was wondering if anyone knows how to change the drive letter assignments in xp pro? I have a multi media reader as my 3.5" drive and that caused the letters to go - c, e, f, g - as the media disk reader drives and H: as my harddrive and d: as my dvd-R.

I want to change the hard drive to the normal C:. Anyone know how I can do this?

[DoctorReno]

You can first try R clicking on My Computer - Manage - Disk Management and seeing if you can get it to change from there.
If not you may have to use this method:

HOW TO: Change the System/Boot Drive Letter in Windows
Changing the System/Boot Drive Letter

1. Make a full system backup of the computer and system state.

2. Log on as an Administrator.

3. Start Regedt32.exe.

4. Go to the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices


5. Click MountedDevices.

6. On the Security menu, click Permissions.

7. Check to make sure Administrators have full control. Change this back when you are finished with these steps.

8. Quit Regedt32.exe, and then start Regedit.exe.

9. Go to the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

10. Find the drive letter you want to change to (new). Look for "\DosDevices\C:".

11. Right-click \DosDevices\C:, and then click Rename.

NOTE: You must use Regedit instead of Regedt32 to rename this registry key.

12. Rename it to an unused drive letter "\DosDevices\Z:". (This will free up drive letter C: to be used later.)

13. Find the drive letter you want changed. Look for "\DosDevices\D:".

14. Right-click \DosDevices\D:, and then click Rename.

15. Rename it to the appropriate (new) drive letter "\DosDevices\C:".

16. Click the value for \DosDevices\Z:, click Rename, and then name it back to "\DosDevices\D:".

17. Quit Regedit, and then start Regedt32.

18. Change the permissions back to the previous setting for

19. Administrators (this should probably be Read Only).
Restart the computer.

[choc101]

There is an easier way to do this.

To save me some writing here

http://www.tweakxp.com/tweakxp/display.asp?id=548

That is what you are trying to do I believe

-Late

[tw1112]

Well, choc101 your method didn't work because it would just say that I cannot change the letter of the main drive or something like that.

DoctorReno, your method seemed to be working fine..until I restarted the computer. It won't let me into winxp anymore..it just hangs on the screen with the WindowsXP blue screen.

Anyone know how to restore the registry without going into windows? I tried a regular bootup disk made in winMe, but whenever I get to the command prompt, it says that it does not see a C:..I am thinking this is caused by the drive letter assignment..but that makes no sense. It just seems like my hard drive is not present whenever I go into command prompt.

[choc101]

Hey,

I'm sorry I forgot that you cant use that method to change the boot drive and the registry method works is the way to do it. It works best for all other drives though.

What did you do that messed it up or think messed it up?(ie drive letter changes)

I know there is a registry restore command in dos for win 9x/me
but im not sure how it will work in XP. You could try it to see if it works. However, doubtful.

 dosprompt> scanreg/restore

You know come to think of it I dont think that you can change the drive letter of the boot partition on XP. It's risky to do this because the boot volume must match what is in the GUID.
You would be best off on maintaining the stability of your system doing a format or nothing at all. which you may have to do anyways I'm sorry to say.


I did a little research and found this. You may want to take a look at it and hopefully it will help.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;EN-US;249321

[choc101]

I forgot to ask also can you boot into safe mode?

[win2kuser]

I am not too sure about WinXP as I hate it and quickly removed before I had a chance to 'play' with it.

But...

In Windows 2000 (very similar to XP without the fancy crap) you can press F8 on boot up to get a list of boot options. If you select 'Last known good configuration', it should boot you in prior to F'ing up the registry.

Hope that helps...

[tw1112]

Thanks guys.

Choc101 - Thanks for your help on this. I tried searching the microsoft site for a way to restore the registry from a bootup but the problem was that I couldn't even see my hard drive from the bootdisk bootup. Weird..

Anyhow, it wouldn't let me boot into any of the options off F8, so instead, last night I ended up just reformatting. It was a pretty new install so nothing that big was lost. I took off the usb multimedia device on installing so that the hard drive would have room to pick C: and it worked.

Plugged the usb device back in after the install and it now takes up- E:, F:, G:, H:

Thanks guys for the help!

For those that are going to try switching the drive letters, make sure you ghost your drive or something so that you can recover from it if this happens to you.

[choc101]

Hey,
Sorry you had to do that but you never learn until you break something.

I just wanted to clerify that after doing some checking I found that there is no "safe" way to change the letter of the boot drive on XP and it is strongly recommended not to do so by MS.

Just some food for thought.

-Laterz

[shawshank62]

im a little late on the subject, but if you have partition magic, which you probably dont anyway, that allows you to change that stuff very easily. glad to see you found what you were looking for.