I have somehow got XP installed on a drive called F:, and My Doc's on a drive called C:. Disk management says that I can't change either as "Windows cannot modify the drive letter of your system volume or boot volume." F is a logical drive in an extended partition and C is a primary partition of the same HDD. (I have two other HDDs split into 3 partitions) I would like to swap the C & F drive letters, and preferably simplify the whole HDD partitioning if possible. Any help on how to do this will be much appreciated.
'C' is your DOS boot partition, and can't be changed AFAIK. You can re-install Win to C and then move 'My Docs' wherever you like, but I don't know a shortcut. Your other programs will have installed with a mix of paths to the OS files as the literal (F:\Win) and as the environment variable %Win%. To get drive letters in the right order from scratch (eg, C, D, E in Drive#0; F, G, H in Drive#1; etc) only the boot drive should have an active primary partition; all other drives should each have an extended partition filling the whole drive with the desired logical drives in each.
Thanks. What also surprised me is that F is first on the disk, but isn't called C as I expected. Should the boot drive also be as your last sentence explains?
I don't see why F: should be first, which drive letter comes up if you boot to DOS? Or which has config.sys, io.sys, autoexec.bat files on? The MSDOS convention (from v.5.0 manual): A, B - reserved for floppy drives C - Active primary (DOS boot) partition D-? - any other primary partitions on other physical drives in order of physical drive number Then logical drives in order of physical drive number, then optical, etc. So if you have a drive with C (primary), D & E (logicals) then buy a new one (fdisking it in exactly the same way) and demote the old drive to slave, the new drive's primary is C, the old drive's primary C becomes D, the new logicals become E & F and the old logicals G & H. There's nothing wrong with having a primary on each physical drive as far as DOS is concerned, but to save me confusion over what's physically where, after doing a drive shuffle I delete the old primary partition (which held the system files and Win), increase the size of the extended partition to fill the old drive and make another logical drive in the released space. Partition Magic or similar needed.
