How to set which drive is c?

I have a new motherboard and system drive.

I have three drives in the system:
The system drive
A data drive with a system image I want to restore
A DVD with the win 7 installation

When it boots up, it keeps assigning C to the data drive and D to the system drive. How do I flip that?

I've got it so the cable for the system drive on the motherboard is on SATA3G_1 and the data drive is on SATA3G_3. I set the boot order in BIOS to be the system drive first.

However it still wants to make the data drive c and this messes up the install.

How do you set which is the c drive?

I also made sure the system drive is marked active and the data drive is not.

Unplug all other HD's and boot the installer. This will assure that Win7 always sees itself as C when booted, whereas if it is run from another OS it will be locked out of claiming C at all.

However you may be seeing drive letters in WinRE or boot mode which are sometimes different from in actual booted Windows.

Follow these steps to get a perfect Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 which are the same for retail Win7.

If I do that then I can't install the system restore from the data drive.

Are you saying that you have installed windows 7 by booting the dvd and using normal windows setup.

Then when you boot into that new windows 7 - it has assigned itself D ?

OR

Are you are saying when you boot the installation dvd - windows pre installation environment assigns D to the HD you are calling systemdrive ?

dude77 said:

If I do that then I can't install the system restore from the data drive.

What System Restore is this?

Are you referring to System Image Recovery from an image stored on data drive?

If so just ignore the letters assigned by WinRE and proceed to run Recovery.

This: "when you boot the installation dvd - windows pre installation environment assigns D to the HD you are calling systemdrive ?"

The DVD makes an X drive which appears to be just in memory or something. The system drive becomes D, the data drive is C, the dvd is E.

gregrocker said:

dude77 said:

If I do that then I can't install the system restore from the data drive.

What System Restore is this?

Are you referring to System Image Recovery from an image stored on data drive?

If so just ignore the letters assigned by WinRE and proceed to run Recovery.

It's the default system restore that comes with windows 7 on the dvd.

I can't just ignore it because it's trying to install windows over my data drive and it doesn't give me an option to restore from the data drive, probably because it doesn't make sense to restore from the drive that's going to get overwritten.

NOTE - if you are booting the dvd - the drive letters will look different from there - don't worry, that is normal.

Identify the drives by their names - which is what you are doing already.

We don't know what you are trying to do.

System restore, system image and installing windows are 3 completely different things.

Can you tell us which you want to do?

Clean Install Windows 7

System Restore

System Image Recovery