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Change primary hard drive letter?

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by galahad04

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I recently pucrhased a new PC without a pre-installed OS, since I have a valid copy of Windows XP Pro and have un-installed it on the PC previously using it. However, since I had to install XP on the PC without any existing partitions, when it created the partition in the initital setup menu at the beginning of the installation, it automatically assigned my primary hard drive as F: drive (rather than C: drive).

When XP was finished installing, I checked the "My Computer" window, and F: drive was still assigned to my primary hard drive. C: and E: drives had been assigned to my the 2 slots in my 7-in-1 card reader as "Removable Disk(s)", and my CD drive was designated as D: drive.

My question is, how do I change the drive letter names within Windows XP so that C: represents my primary hard drive? I can manually change the current drive letters set for the 7-in-1 card reader using the XP Disk Management snap-in, but when I try to change my hard drve's letter, I receive an error message that says "Windows cannot modify the drive letter of your system volume or boot volume." (Or is this normal behavior for PCs that have card readers?)

13 replies

by kdhakl

Have had a similar problem b4 when I installed windows.

Found the easiest wasy was to unplug the device from wither the USB port or motherboard and install windows.

by dmiles

How to change a drive letter
To change an existing drive letter on a drive, on a partition, or on a volume, follow these steps: 1. Log on as Administrator or as a member of the Administrators group.
2. Click Start, click Control Panel, and then click Performance and Maintenance.
3. Click Administrative Tools, double-click Computer Management, and then click Disk Management in the left pane.
4. Right-click the drive, the partition, the logical drive, or the volume that you want to assign a drive letter to, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.
5. Click Change.
6. Click Assign the following drive letter if it is not already selected, click the drive letter that you want to use, and then click OK.
7. Click Yes when you are prompted to confirm the drive letter change.

by gsree

Windows XP allows you to change the drive letters except for the primary partition where its installed. In your case F: will stay. All system registry values are written based on the initial scenario it is given or 'finds'. Any changes to the primary boot volume will end you up in system not booting up.By default system security, it is strictly not allowed. The error message has nothing to do with the card reader. It will be ideal to re-install the OS and run through the setup options, choose the appropriate drives.

by barrybartlett

Hi Just a note here guys. I may know what is casuing this. I have installed windows xp a few times myself and this has happened, the main system drive where Windows should have installed (C: Drive) is a different letter.

This is caused by the card reader itself. You cannot fix this unless you disconnect the card reader cables from the mother board and then reinstall Win XP. It will then install correctly into the C Drive.

Hope this helps.

Thanks, Barry

by techrepublic

You can change drive letters in Disk Management except for the system or boot volume. For that you need to go into the Registry. It's at HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices. There you'll see \DosDevices\{driveletter}. First unplug your card reader and reboot. Then it's just a matter of renaming the entry from \DosDevices\F to \DosDevices\C.
But... there's always a but. Windows thinks it's installed as the F: drive and it will not work correctly if you change it's drive letter.
The answer is to re-install Windows (without the card reader plugged in).
Boot from the Win XP disk, during setup select clean install and delete any existing partitions. This will allow you to create a new partition in the unused space and install will automatically make it C:.

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