Wrong Drive Leter

Richard wrote in message
.. .

Just put in a new single hard drive, a 120 meg WD. I also have an A drive
and a CD drive. When I formated and added XP Pro it assigned the HD a
drive letter other than C and the management utility in XP tells me I can't
change the drive letter for the boot disk. What did I do wrong?

You should have chosen to format the drive before
doing a clean install of XP. Likely you didnt do it that way.

No big deal tho, why do you care what letter its got ?

"Rod Speed" wrote in message
...

Richard wrote in message
.. .

Just put in a new single hard drive, a 120 meg WD. I also have an A
drive
and a CD drive. When I formated and added XP Pro it assigned the HD a
drive letter other than C and the management utility in XP tells me I
can't
change the drive letter for the boot disk. What did I do wrong?

You should have chosen to format the drive before
doing a clean install of XP. Likely you didnt do it that way.

No big deal tho, why do you care what letter its got ?


It was a new drive that I did a complete format on prior to installing XP;
really.

Richard.

"Richard" wrote in message ...

"Rod Speed" wrote in message
...

Richard wrote in message
.. .

Just put in a new single hard drive, a 120 meg WD. I also have an A
drive
and a CD drive. When I formated and added XP Pro it assigned the HD a
drive letter other than C and the management utility in XP tells me I
can't
change the drive letter for the boot disk. What did I do wrong?

You should have chosen to format the drive before
doing a clean install of XP. Likely you didnt do it that way.

No big deal tho, why do you care what letter its got ?


It was a new drive that I did a complete format on prior to installing XP;
really.

How did you do the format ?

The XP install allows you to format the drive.

Maybe you autoran the CD after you formatted the drive
with something else and thats why you got that result.

I have always got the C letter when I boot the
CD and use the format option you get that way.

"Andy" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 10:14:38 GMT, "Richard"
wrote:

Just put in a new single hard drive, a 120 meg WD. I also have an A drive
and a CD drive. When I formated and added XP Pro it assigned the HD a
drive
letter other than C and the management utility in XP tells me I can't
change
the drive letter for the boot disk. What did I do wrong?

When you selected the partition on which to install XP, you failed to
notice that the drive letter assigned to the partition was not C:.


Richard.


To make this clear. I put in the new drive; booted up into the XP Pro disk,
and let it do the full format. I did not notice at that time that it had
assigned any drive letter to the new drive. I guess everyone is telling me
there is no way to change this from E to C?

Richard.

On Wed, 25 Jun 2003 11:04:20 -0400, "Richard"
wrote:

"Andy" wrote in message
.. .
On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 10:14:38 GMT, "Richard"
wrote:

Just put in a new single hard drive, a 120 meg WD. I also have an A drive
and a CD drive. When I formated and added XP Pro it assigned the HD a
drive
letter other than C and the management utility in XP tells me I can't
change
the drive letter for the boot disk. What did I do wrong?

When you selected the partition on which to install XP, you failed to
notice that the drive letter assigned to the partition was not C:.


Richard.


To make this clear. I put in the new drive; booted up into the XP Pro disk,
and let it do the full format. I did not notice at that time that it had
assigned any drive letter to the new drive. I guess everyone is telling me
there is no way to change this from E to C?

I'm assuming you installed the new drive as master on the primary IDE
channel and had another drive containing one partition. In this
situation, the XP installation program assigns drive letters to
existing hard drive partitions, which you can see on the screen that
shows you the drives and their partitions. Now when you create a
partition on the new drive, it is assigns the next free drive letter,
which is E:, since the CD drive is D:. If you proceed with the
installation by formatting the partition, XP will be installed to
drive E:. The way to fix this is to abort the installation (F3 F3),
and restart it. The installation program will then assigned the drive
letters as expected.


Richard.

I had the new drive set to the default setting, which was cable select. It
assigned no other drive as C. Strange but true. Perhaps the cable select
threw XP off.

Richard.

Richard wrote in message
...

I had the new drive set to the default setting, which
was cable select. It assigned no other drive as C.

Are you sure you used a cable select cable and that
that cable select was available at the controller end ?

Strange but true. Perhaps the cable select threw XP off.

Nope, most new systems use that now for the ATA100 class drives.

Its more likely that the boot off the XP CD got
rather confused about something else as the
C: drive and so gave the hard drive the E: letter.

You should be able to use the F6 which is normally
used to load disk drivers etc to allow you to see whats
happened drive letter wise that early in the install.

In , Andy wrote:
Software has absolutely no way of detecting

You don't say.
So what -in your expert opinion- is the word 93, bits 10-9 and 2-1 used for then?

10-9 (2-1) These bits indicate how Device 1 (0) determined the device number:
00 = Reserved.
01 = a jumper was used.
10 = the CSEL signal was used.
11 = some other method was used or the method is unknown.

or being influenced by whether drives are jumpered master/slave or cable select.

The XP installation program is seeing some storage device as C:, perhaps
a ZIP drive or a memory card reader; otherwise it would immediately
assign C: to the new drive when you create a partition.

On Thu, 26 Jun 2003 10:20:28 -0400, "Richard"
wrote:

I had the new drive set to the default setting, which was cable select. It
assigned no other drive as C. Strange but true. Perhaps the cable select
threw XP off.

Richard.