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Changing Drive Letters

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by omegafire

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I was wondering if changing the drive letters of my local disks will have any effect on the files that are on the drives or the programs that are installed to the hard drives.

I tried to dual boot Windows XP and Ubuntu but things went wrong... so to make it short, after reinstalling Windows my drive letters ended up being:

Primary: Local Disk (E:)
Secondary: Local Disk (D:)

I want the primary to be C and the secondary to be D. I know how to change them. I just want to know if it will cause problems.

-Travis

8 replies

by older mycroft

When you 'reinstalled' maybe you installed a duplicate bootable Windows XP.

Check to see if there is a C:\ partition sitting in the background with the old Windows XP still on it.

by omegafire

My primary is labeled E: >> needs to be C:
My secondary is labed C: >> needs to be D:

Also, there are is only one bootable windows XP

by Former member

If it is "D", then you will need to back up your files.
If it is "E" then you will need to back up your files anyway, then change your drive letters.

Please post back if you have anymore problems or questions.

by omegafire

I am booting of my "E" drive right now, which is where all my programs are installed to.

All of my movies/music/backup files are stored on my "C" drive which is my secondary.

Problem is my "C" drive is 50% full with 250 gigs of info. which i have no way of backing up. While my "E" drive is 50% full with 90 gigs of info.

man what a big mess...

by Former member

I had the same thing as you have now, but i did not back it up, but luckily i had software (the software i have is not cheap either) get my programs and tons of files back 100%. So you really do need to do a back up, get another drive.

Please post back if you have anymore problems or questions.

by oh smeg

You need to reinstall the OS with the Primary Drive/Partition already formatted. If you need to start with a unformatted Drive/Partition and retain other formated Drives/partitions you need to restart the install procedure after the Format of the Primary Partition is complete.

Windows will not allow you to change the Primary Drive Letter.

The others don't matter as Windows should track the changes and sort out the different shortcuts for the installed Media at least though any Desktop Shortcuts that you have made may no longer work. You can use a Utility like Norton's Win Doctor to repair any broken links as well. But none of these will change any links to Optical Media that needs to be inserted to run some application.

Col

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