How to change drive letter for boot drive?

[Patyacht]

Correct. I think that is what I did and when it saw XP on the drive it kept C Drive closed for use when it did the windows.old before formating and put Win 7 on the 1st available drive which, in my case was "L". I'm thinking of formatting the drive then boot from the DVD and see if win 7 will go in C drive. I've got my data backed up to a Network Drive. What do you think?

 

[gregrocker]

Yes, boot from the DVD to do the formatting so DVD reads XP first to allow Upgrade Key.

Keep ethernet plugged and choose "Connect to Internet during Install" to get latest drivers/Updates during install, then Custom>Advanced Drive Tools to repartition as desired, making sure to format before install.

Upon startup, connect to internet and get more drivers from Windows Updates, check Device Manager for any missing drivers which can be found on your manufacturer's Support Downloads page for your model, along with favorite apps. Adobe Reader/Flash and Java runtime/poss. free Ofc Suite from their sites.

 

[Patyacht]

That will not do it because that is what I did and ended up with Win 7 identifing the boot drive as the "L" Drive and not the "C" drive. Ironically it's the only HD in the machine. Go figure thus my comment that MS messed up again.

 

[gregrocker]

You didn't format before, right?

If you boot from the DVD and format then Win7 should take the C drive that XP now occupies.

 

[Patyacht]

Got it done. Had to do a Reinstall. Before I did it I made sure my data was backed up on another drive, I disconnected all drives and removable drives except my primary HD and DVD/CD. Then when the system was up and running, I verified my boot drive was "C" and used the Drive Management Utility to rename the other drives in the order I wanted them. That's a slick utility I did not know about. (It's in Vista also)

 

[jbarton]

Whether I am in Vista or Windows 7, the partition containing Vista is labelled as "C" and the partition containing Win7 is labelled as "I" and the other 5 drives are simply storage drives with their own labels. The boot files etc are on the "I" drive. When I had done the same thing other times, the Win7 installation automatically assigned letter "C" to the Win7 partition and changed the Vista label to something else. I simply want "C" to be the partition containing the OS I am in for simplicity and continuity purposes. I don't want to have to remember that Windows 7 is on "I" I hope that clarifiles my situatioin. Thanks again for your comments.

fafner

I'm sure you have gone on to one resolution or another to your problem by now. Sorry I didn't see your post before now but I don't generally have problems with drive letters. I've been manipulating those for a very long time now. The method I use is both natural and effective. Natural in that there is no coersion needed to obtain the desired results and effective in that it always works if you are doing a fresh installation of the OS.

First step is to set the active partition to the one you intend to do your installation on. This will cause it to become C: when the installation runs. I've used this method with Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, Server 2003 and Server 2008.

The second step just prior to running setup for the new OS, is to enter the BIOS setup at boot time (if you are using multiple physical hard drives) (the machine I am on now uses 4) and set the 1st boot drive to the one that has the partition you want to install your OS to. This is because you can have as many active partitions as you have hard drives. The BIOS needs to know which one you are targeting.

Now when you allow the boot process to continue, the BIOS will attempt to initiate system boot from your target partition. Of course, your installation disk should intercept this boot attempt and start the setup process instead (since the target partition is usually empty anyway).

After the setup finishes installing the new OS, I always use Compmngr.msc (by whatever name it is known in the new OS) to remove the drive letters from all other OS partitions and adjust the others to my needs for this OS.

Works everytime.