changing drive letters

[yolagp]

Hi, a friend of mine made a clean install of winxp pro, and at the same time added a second hard disk. He doesn't know what he did wrong, but now he's got:
Drive A: floppy
Volume C: nothing
Drive D: CDRom
Drive E: CDRW
Drive F: system
Drive G: storage.
How can we change those letters? Winxp's management tool didn't let us. Maybe with Partition Magic? I tried to install a program called letter asigner, but XP didn't like it. Is it possible to change the drive letter of the system drive?

[Vic 970]

Does a 'clean install' mean "fdisk & format" of the original drive ?

how many partitions to original drive ?

was the 2nd hdd added before or after ?

was it fdisk & formatted ?

if so how many partitions ?

[papertech]

Here's a link that discusses drive letter assignment:

www.duxcw.com/faq/win/xp/drltr.htm (http://www.duxcw.com/faq/win/xp/drltr.htm)

Keep in mind that during install, all physical drives are assigned sequential letters, then logical drives follow.

You should respond to Vic's questions for further input. You probably have issues caused from the two upgrades done at once.

[JUAN DOS]

Disk management allows changing all drive letters except your boot volume (normally "C"). Obviously your install was not on "C".

When installing XP, you are asked where you want to install it. It appears that XP was installed on first partition of the slave.

Suggestion 1: swap the drives on the IDE cables (master to slave & vice versa)

Suggestion 2 : try reinstalling on the empty "C", and formatting the "F" partition, if there is data loss issue.

Suggestion 3: reformat and start over, reading the instructions carefully.
I would suggest that you pull the slave, and add it after installing XP. During the XP setup onto a "new" hard drive, you are asked to create a partition for XP. You have to specify the size, or it will use the entire drive. Do some reading before installing XP.

Lots to read on partitioning here:
http://www.aumha.org/a/parts.htm

More to read on installing XP here:
http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;q286463#6