Hard Drive Letters

somechick_73 · #1 (**permalink**) 03-05-2008, 09:48 PM

My secondary drive is still reading as C:, which is preventing me from using my fonts folder in pretty much all programs I have. My Primary drive is reading as D:

So you see my dilemma now? I need to swap my secondary( C: ) and make it ( d: ) and make my primary( d: ) into drive ( c: ) Does anybody know of any programs that might help me do this besides partition magic because that doesn't seem to work either.

I'm running windows XP professional, and so the normal way wont allow me to do it, everything is grayed out and unusable.

**Arcángel** · 03-06-2008, 06:34 AM

You are going to want to switch your cables. Depending on your computer, some cables are labeled for Primary Master, Primary Slave, etc etc. Sometimes swapping your cables will do the trick. Taht will cause the BIOS or CMOS to do a more thorough POST test to make sure that everything (boot media, memory, system fan,, etc) is in working order. As for your hard drive problem, this could probably be resolved automatically.

If not, you are going to have to check your BIOS or CMOS setings and make sure that both hard drives are configured correctly. Make sure that your Master is the drive that you want the BIOS to acknowledge as drive C and your slave is what you want the BIOS to acknowledge as drive D. Reboot your system and look out for any error messages from the BIOS or Boot Loader. If not, then let the computer boot into Windows normally.

If not, the only other way that I could imagine you could change a drive letter is booting into a partition recovery / creation software like FDISK (standard with most MS-DOS versioins), Partition Magic, Ghost, Acronis True Image or something else and attempting to change the drive letter from there.

Either way, your system MUST realize that the SYSTEM32 folder is on C:, not D. The trick is, finding out which drive is which.

Afterwards, you might want to run a chkdsk /f /r just to make sure that everything on both drives is kosher.

somechick_73 · 03-06-2008, 10:12 PM

I don't wanna fuck with any of that bios cmos shit. That's too risky for someone whose never done that before. I think I might just reformat and disconnect my secondary drive while I do it. That way it will realize that C is my primary, because thats the only easy way I can figure to do it.

It's two SATA drives, and I'm beginning to think SATA is shit besides the speed.

**Arcángel** · 03-07-2008, 05:04 AM

Reformatting is only warranted if there is actually any damage to any of the partitions on either of the drives. Moreover, reformatting will not reassign a drive letter. It will just create a new partition for the Operating System to write to while causing (in this case) needless data loss.

If you want to stay away from modifying the settings in the CMOS or BIOS, the best thing you could do is physically swap the drives from cable to cable. That should cause the BIOS to recognize that there was a hardware change and a new "Primary Master" drive.

My best advice to you is to leave reformatting as your LAST resort.

somechick_73 · 03-07-2008, 07:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by El_Subestimado

Reformatting is only warranted if there is actually any damage to any of the partitions on either of the drives. Moreover, reformatting will not reassign a drive letter. It will just create a new partition for the Operating System to write to while causing (in this case) needless data loss.

If you want to stay away from modifying the settings in the CMOS or BIOS, the best thing you could do is physically swap the drives from cable to cable. That should cause the BIOS to recognize that there was a hardware change and a new "Primary Master" drive.

My best advice to you is to leave reformatting as your LAST resort.

They are sata drives, and I'm not sure if a simple swap of the cable is going to do anything at all. But I will give that a try later.