Changing drive letter back to c:\

mickey megabyte · 17 Aug 2009

Muad Dib said:

You mean using 240 AC is not what they mean by increasing the RAM voltages?

Dang it, I knew there was a trick to it! I better go and change that post I made in another forum...

dang! and i've just paid good money for this!

Antman · 17 Aug 2009

mickey megabyte said:

dang! and i've just paid good money for this!

Petrossa Brand.

chuckr · 19 Aug 2009

squonksc said:

@ OP and ChuckR,

My advise to not do it, is not based on a guess.

I have tried it a few times on different OS's just for the fun of finding out if it could be done.

I even had the tools to go through registry and automatically change all instances of d: to c:

But there are a lot of registry pointers in hex numbers, and all kind of other numbered references that represent the bootdisk.

A lot of apps use ini files with references.
You would have to go through those also.

But before I ever got to the point of changing everything, my OS would go into all kinds of BSOD and errors.
I never made it through without wrecking my OS.

Is it impossible? No, probably not.
Is it worth the trouble? Definitely not!
Greetz

squonksc,
Thanks for the post - must have missed it somehow...

To me, its now a question of "How does he do that?"

Personally, I would also just leave it as it is, without 'trying' anything.

But now, given the situation and the 'facts', it just makes me wonder what the heck is going on here...

One partition, Win 7 calls everyplace he's booted from as "C:" (even if XP calls it "R:"), etc. And Win 7 uses "D:"

Things don't 'jive' in my mind, so it would be interesting to try to understand whatever 'mechanism' he's operating under...

(Another M$ 'Unsolved mystery', I guess!)
Technet might have a blurb somewhere, regarding this, but I'm not gonna chase it down (not too soon, anyway)...

TSM · 11 Dec 2013

Hey, just wanted to add a solution to this problem, since this post is one of the top google search results. I know it's an old thread, but people will see it, and it may be useful to someone.

I had to change the drive letter back to C after reinstalling windows and finding that some essential drivers assume the drive letter is C and therefore can never be installed. There is a super easy solution, and you can effectively change the drive letter back to C after reinstalling windows or whatever. Just create a symbolic link.

Right click My Computer, go to Computer Management, shrink a drive down 8MB, and create a new drive C:/.

Then just open the command prompt as administrator (type cmd into start menu, right click run as administrator), and and type commands like this, as necessary.

mklink /J "C:\Program Files" "D:\Program Files"
mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)" "D:\Program Files (x86)"
mklink /J "C:\Users" "D:\Users"
mklink /J "C:\Windows" "D:\Windows"

Sadly, it appears that it is not possible to go directly from D to C, but this will fix any program installation issues and works for all practical purposes. But at least this works immediately with no effort or risk.