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Reassigning drive letters

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by calm dog

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I have a Dell XPS 300 running Win 98 1st edition. The HD is partitioned into C, D & E with a Zip drive on F and CD-ROM on G. I recently tried to install a second HD for more storage space. Everything went fine until I realized that Win 98 had assigned the second HD as D and reassigned the additional partitions of the first HD to E and F. Naturally, nothing on these partitions is now registered correctly.

Drive letter assignment is greyed out in the Device Manager. Is there anything else I can do to correct this short of reinstalling all that software?

Thanks,
Keith

15 replies

by dmiles

If you have multiple hard drives and multiple partitions,Windows will assign drive letters to the Primary Partitions then to the extended partitions.
There is no conventional way of changing the drive letters unless you remove the second hard drive,so you possibly will need to reinstall the software to specific drives

by thechas

Windows 9X follows a specific hiarchy when assigning drive letters. And only allows you to change drive letters for removable media drives.
Drive 0 first partition is C:
Drive 1 First partition is D:
Drive 0 partitions follow in order.
Drive 1 partitions follow in order.
If you add a 3rd drive, it's first partition becomes drive E:.
And so on.

There are 2 ways to take care of your problem.
The simplist is to re-evaulute how you partitioned the 2nd HDD, and copy the files from your drive 0 D: and E: partitions as needed so that they end up on the correct drive.

Alternately, most of what is messed up is the shortcuts on your desktop and start menu, and file storage locations in the programs themselves.
You can go to the properties for each shortcut, and manually change the drive letter in both the Target, and Start in boxes as needed. Then, in each program you may need to adjust the default folder that it looks for / saves files to.
That should take care of most of the problems. You may need to re-install a couple of programs if they have "hidden" file settings.

There are several registry repair utilities that will perform most of the corrections automatically.
Both Win Doctor from Norton, Fix-It from Meijenixwork pretty good.

by thechas

I checked out the MS KB article that NetTek listed.

It will take care of the HDD letters.

You will need to use fdisk to remove all partitions on the second drive, and repartition it to have just an extended partition with logical drives structured as you desire.

Your other IDE drives (CD, ZIP) will still be assigned new letters.
I would do as the article says, and more the drive letters far away from the letters for the HDD. I use "R" for my CD, and "W" for my CD-RW drive.

Any software that uses files from the CD will need to be adjusted to look for the files on the correct drive letter.

You can search the registry using regedit for the old drive letter F:, and modify the appropriate settings to the new letter for your CD and Zip drive.
!!WARNING!! USE CAUTION WITH REGEDIT, AS YOU CAN DISABLE YOUR COMPUTER IF YOU EDIT OR DELETE SOME VALUES INCORRECTLY!!!

by shanghai sam

After trying everything, I finally gave up and, as you suggested, just adjusted the shortcuts. It was the best workaround I could find. Thanks for your input, Charlie.

by nettek

Knowledge Base article Q282530 at support.microsoft.com explains how to do it.

Hope that helps.

by shanghai sam

This was a very good article - I kept a copy for the 'next' time. Unfortunately, the article states something like, "If you follow the above instructions, the drive letters shouldn't change." They did. Guess I was having a bad karma day. Thanks for your help.

by d_v ant

One option would be to partition the second drive with just an extended partition and then you could assign it a drive letter of "F". I have had to do this on occasion myself.

by ins413

How about, and I haven't tried this... But if you are using a ZIP drive, then IOMEGA has the drive renaming feature built into its software. Just a thought, and hopefully a good one. Plan B... Partiton Magic will do this as well, but I would use it as a last resort. Again, just a thought. Good luck nonetheless.

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