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General discussion

Local Disk not "C" drive

by Dalpark Nov 8, 2004 3:37AM PST

To eliminate some nasty viruses I decided to delete my 98 OS and install XP Home. I booted the XP cd and deleted the partition and main system drive, rebooted and continued with the XP installation. After a successful install I noticed that my drive letters were off. My local disk is now the 'F' drive and my removable disk is now the 'C' drive. I repeated the installation process and the same result. Is there a fix at the windows level or is this a hardware issue? Can I disconnect my removable disk and reinstall? Will this work? I'm Lost!!
My drives are as follows:
A:floppy - C:removable disk
D:CDR - E:CDR/W - F:local disk

Discussion is locked

4 Posts
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Got ZIP?
by r. proffitt Former Forum moderator Nov 8, 2004 5:29AM PST
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Re: Local Disk not
by JamesJ Nov 9, 2004 3:56PM PST

Do you really need to re-install? The drive letters may be weird, but as I understand it, XP will still work OK, even with the weird drive letters.

Having said that, when I ran into the same kind of thing a while back, I re-installed XP because I wasn't prepared to accept the weird drive letters. Happy

Just FYI, your removeable drive may be a factor, but it may not be the only one. Did you keep any old Windows partitions/drives? When I installed XP on a new drive, leaving several old Win98 partitions on other drives intact, XP ended up calling its root drive F: or something like that. I won't go into all the details, but basically I "hid" all the old partitions (eg. disconnected drives), re-installed XP (this time it called its root drive C), then I put the other partitions back (eg. reconnected drives). It was a bit of a pain, but not too bad (and worth the trouble, IMO). If you have old Windows partitions/drives that you want to keep, you may be able to do something similar. How practical that is will depend on the specifics of your system.

James

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Re: Local Disk not "C" drive
by Babaganoosh Nov 28, 2004 8:29AM PST

Had this same problem sometime last year when I reloaded my system from scratch. Did some research on the Net, nothing really useful though. Think I ended up F3-ing through the whole registry and changed all instances of F:\ to C:\. Don't recall exactly all what I did, but somehow ended up getting everything working and boot drive listed as "C:". Wished I had taken notes, 'cause I'm reliving this headache as we speak (annual clean install). Followed instructions in URL below yesterday (ignoring caveat of 'not recommended') and now system freezes up at logon screen. Had thought about trying it anyway, but JamesJ's suggestion re-affirmed my thoughts of disconnecting extra drives and reinstalling XP again. Probably not the smartest solution, but I don't have time or patience to try and hack out the fix at this point.

Good luck all, cheers.

-B-


http://www.petri.co.il/change_system_drive_letter_in_windows_xp.htm

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Re: Local Disk not "C" drive
by Merl Priester Nov 28, 2004 11:15AM PST

Some programs REQUIRE the boot drive to be C:
Just re-install now while it is still painless.

Disconnect the ZIP while installing.

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