How to change drive letters ( D: E: F: ) after they're installed? (1 Viewer)

[Rob FM]

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[Richard Cooper]

Hi Rob,
This one *should* be any easy one! Right Click on 'My COmputer' and go down to 'properties'. This opens up the systems properties box. Click on the 'Device Manager' tab, and then click on the + by 'CDROM'. There should be both your drives listed there. Double click on the one you want to be the 'E' drive (DVD) and then click on the 'Settings' tab. Down the bottom should be a box labelled 'Reserved Drive letter'. Set these both to 'E'. Click 'OK' and do teh same for teh Writer, changing the reserved letter to 'F'. Click 'OK, and 'OK' on the System Properties box. Let the computer reboot, and all should be well.
I hope that makes sense!
Richard

 

[Glenn Overholt]

It might give you trouble, though. (You'd have 2 - E drives.) Rename E to G, and the old F to E, reboot and rename G to F - Yeah, that's confusing.
Glenn

 

[Ken Chan]

There's a general rule of not putting ATAPI (DVD-ROM, CD-ROM, tape) drives on the same channel as regular hard disks. So if you make the DVD-ROM the secondary master and the CD-RW the secondary slave, that should give you the drive letters you want.
Of course, if you're doing a lot of copying from the DVD-ROM to the CD-RW, it might work better the way you already have it, so in that case, never mind
//Ken

 

[Rob FM]

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[Rob Gillespie]

I've never used Me, but in 98 you cannot change the letter assignments for hard drives.
Perhaps Me has functionality that I'm not aware of, but I'm surprised that you were even given the option of giving the second HD partition a letter after one the of CD drives.
The drive letter assignments work with this prioritised order (assuming each section exists):
Hard drive 1 Primary DOS partition IDE 1
Hard drive 2 Primary DOS partition IDE 2
Hard drive 1 extended DOS logical drives in order
Hard drive 2 extended DOS logical drives in order
Any CD/DVD drives on IDE 1
Any CD/DVD drives on IDE 2
This is assuming Me works the same way as 95/98.

I then loaded Windows ME, made 2 partitions on the Hard Drive ( C: & D: ).

Did you actually create both hard drive partitions within Me? The usual course of action with the 9x based versions of Windows is to partition the drive then install the OS.
[Edited last by Rob Gillespie on August 14, 2001 at 02:26 AM]

 

[Iain Lambert]

Rob, I'm fairly sure you can do the same on 98; take a look in the Device Manager when you get a chance if you're interested. One small thing to be aware of is that if you do play with this, some unhelpful programs don't cope with the the CD being a different drive from when they were installed. Thats why I always bump the CDs down a couple of letters to allow for another partition or two in the future.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

It's been a while since I did anything more than play Unreal Tournament in Win98, but I remember having a similar problem when installing a second hard drive a couple of years back.
Because I'd put a Primary DOS partition on the second HD, that then became my new D drive. No way it could be changed from within Windows. The only way to get my original 'D' back was to wipe the second disk and install the partitions again as extended DOS logical drives.
Which is why I'm surprised Rob's configuration has ended up how it has.

 

[Rob FM]

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[Rob Gillespie]

Rob, having never installed Me, I'm curious about how this came to be.
You've FDISKd the drive and created two partitions - a Primary DOS (active) and a Logical in the extended DOS partition - right?
You then installed Me
And then found that the drive letters were wrong? Or did it actually ask you what letters to use? This is where I'm getting confused because normally in 9x installations you don't specify drive letters at all. In fact you don't even do that in Windows 2000.

 

[Dean DeMass]

having never installed Me

Rob,
You are much wiser by never doing this.

-Dean-

 

[Iain Lambert]

Ok, lets rewind a sec and make sure I'm not lost. Changing hard-drive letters is a non-trivial pain in the bottom, I agree, but shifting the DVD and Writer drive letters should be simple. Unfortunately, Windows takes its pick on what to call them, but removables can have their letters re-assigned in Device Manager.
Aren't you all glad I checked this time around?

Anyway, ME isn't that bad. If you've ever struggled with drivers as much as I have you'll be ready to praise them to high heaven for the wonder that is System Restore. Also, the amount of patches, service packs, driver updates etc. that you need to do the moment 98 touches the box is a right pain. Just be careful however - Mandrake killed my ME installation the first two times I tried to build a dual boot machine.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Windows takes its pick on what to call them

Not sure that's right there Iain. The letters are usually assigned by priority in the order I listed above. A hard drive will always come before a CD drive in letter. And if you've got two drives one the same channel, the master always gets the first letter.
I think I'd be tempted to remove the two CD drives and get the HD letter assignemnts correct. Then add the two CDs back hopefully it should all fall back into place.

 

[Iain Lambert]

oops, mis-explained myself again. It takes its pick based on the list you gave; I'm mildly surprised it put the secondary slave before the secondary master myself, but as I said its possible to change drive letters on removable drives. I have no D: or E: but my DVD-ROM is F: and the writer is G:.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Yeah, but would have had to have done that deliberately.
Damn, confused now!