Solved Dual boot Win7 & XP, XP partition drive letter reassignment?

[OvenMaster]

I searched for my specific issue but haven't been able to find it.

I've a dual-boot setup with XP Home SP3 and Win7 Pro 32bit on one hard drive, data on the others, and two DVD writers.

After Win7 was installed, the XP partition received the letter D:

This screwed up my optical drive letter assignments.

Shown in the pic is Disk Management in Win7. (In XP, the Win7 partition shows up as I:, which causes no problems)

When I went to change the XP partition letter to X:, so that I could reassign my opticals to the standard D: and E: letters, I got the message shown in the box.

My question is, is it possible to reassign the XP partition's letter, so that I can get D: and E: back as optical drive letter assignements? Will reassigning the XP partition a letter other than D: screw up booting Win7?

 

[seavixen32]

I certainly wouldn't advocate trying to change system drive letters.

I think, quite honestly, your best solution is to allocate new drive letters to your optical drives.

I would suggest K and L so that the two optical drives are unaffected by whichever system you boot into.

 

[OvenMaster]

Dang. I was hoping against hope. BTW, I forgot to post what Disk Management looks like in XP:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/831/xpdrivemgmt.jpg/
Win7 got put in a partition marked "I" and I kept my D: and E: optical assignments. I just wanted to keep them consistent, but I gather from your input that it's not exactly recommended.

Thank you for the input. And Brink, thanks for fixing the first pic. I'd forgotten about the upload procedure here.

 

[gregrocker]

By far the best option when you have separate HD's is to install Dual Boot to separate HD's, unplugging the other HD's during install.

Then boot the preferred HD by setting it first to boot in BIOS setup, boot the other using the one-time BIOS Boot Menu key.

This keeps them separate to come and go as you please. Both are lettered C if they are correctly installed from boot.