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Changing Drive Letters
Mindblower
Montreal, Canada
664 Posts
(Offline)
1
July 4, 2009 - 2:39 pm

Hope someone has played with this and knows what to do. A friend recently installed a new motherboard, processor and hardisk. While installing XP, for some strange reason, Drive C was NOT used, but Drive G was designated. To make matters more complex. he decided to create a partition so Data would be kept apart (guess for doing backups and/or defrags). This partition was assigned as H, and when you look at the Drives, Drive C (which does not exist) is labeled as removable while G & H are fixed. His DVD drives are D & E while Flash Drive (memory stick) is given I.

His question is can (and how) to assign the G & H fixed drives to C & D, and then the DVD units would become E & F.

Hope I've not made it too difficult to understand, (and yes, I'll most likely be taking the credit, since I did post his request ), Mindblower!

"For the needy, not the greedy"

Nightowl78
78 Posts
(Offline)
2
July 4, 2009 - 5:22 pm

Hi Mindblower:

If your friend has a USB card reader attached to the motherboard it is possible that the C, D, drives were assigned there first. I installed XP on a new hard drive with the card reader still attached to the USB controller on the motherboard and it assigned the drive letters to the card reader first, then the hard drive, so that XP showed up as the "I" drive. I unplugged the USB on the motherboard and reinstalled XP and it put the C: drive where it belonged, then reattached the card reader and it installed those drives in the correct order. Not sure if this will give you any help in your situation, it is just an experience I had with drive letters.

Chad Johnson
867 Posts
(Offline)
3
July 5, 2009 - 8:58 am

and as far as changing drive letters after windows is installed...well, you can't. Rather, you can, but Windows would be unuseable.

Changing the data drive probably isn't a big deal, you just have to update any shortcuts that point to it. The system drive however....not pretty.

So if it really bothers your friend not to be on the C drive, then a re-install will be necessary, after making sure that the Optical drives and the fixed disks are the only disks in the system at boot (you can probably disable the others in BIOS if they're internal rather than crack open the case).

--zig

sirpaul1
22 Posts
(Offline)
4
April 6, 2010 - 11:52 pm

A lot of users purposely do not use the 'C:' drive for their operating system to avoid malware. Malware authors attack the 'C:' drive because 99.99% of users put their OS on it.

Chad Johnson
867 Posts
(Offline)
5
April 7, 2010 - 9:43 am

I wish that were true.
Very few malware authors hardcode 'c:windows' but instead use the handily provided Windows variable %SYSTEMDRIVE% (or something like that) which dumps you right into the Windows installation dir.
[url:gh6n2tw7]http://kennethhunt.com/archives/000933.html[/url:gh6n2tw7]

LAHarry
29 Posts
(Offline)
6
April 30, 2010 - 6:55 am

[quote="sirpaul1":3euqmxl0]A lot of users purposely do not use the 'C:' drive for their operating system to avoid malware. Malware authors attack the 'C:' drive because 99.99% of users put their OS on it.[/quote:3euqmxl0]

Probably it's not true.
Malwares attack computer systems only as they need system program/files to hide or activate/execute. They will certainly find where the system drive is , so C or D drive or any of the others makes no difference.

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