More dual-boot trouble: Drive letters reversed in new XP install

[Sheila Qwann]

As I posted in another question, I have a dual-boot dual-hdd PC. One hdd is partitioned into 2, so I have C:\, D:\ & E:\. Yesterday, I attempted to create a second partition on the other HDD C:\ using "Partition Magic 8.0" so I could load XP home there (producing 2 win2k's & 1 XP OS). I have used this utility in the past with success, but for some reason this time it locked up mid-point, & when I rebooted C:\ was missing from WE. The drive did appear in Partition Magic, under the name ?!?, so I renamed it C:\ in the utility & formatted it from there. Seemed to work fine. Then I loaded XP on the C:\, but noted immediately when I was asked to select the partition to load the OS that C & D were transposed. After the program loaded, indeed C & D are transposed in XP'S WE, but are as they have always been under win2k's WE. How can I reverse the names of C & D while running XP?

Thanks!

Sheila

[youngsw]

if I understand the question correctly, when you are in Winxp the partition which has win2k is now D and the XP partition is C ? But when you are in Win2k the partition is C and the XP partition is D ?

As far as I know the partition with the OS you are running is the "C drive" and cannot be changed as far as I know.

[Paul Komski]

It is confusing (with WinXP and Win2K in particular) to refer to the various drives and partitions by drive letters, which are assigned by the OS after booting up and do not refer to an absolute value or reference. By all means give your partitions meaningful "labels" which is a good idea and can help you differentiate between them - whatever the drive letter happens to be. So identify the drives by Master and Slave or HDD 0 and 1 and the partitions by a numerical position on the drive or by a name that you have called them. Once a partition has been assigned a drive letter under Win2K/XP it is remembered thereafter by those systems unlike the DOS-based OSes which assign drive letters dynamically at every boot.

When single booting, the active partition is (nearly always) the C drive though this is not a constant phenomenon under the NT-based OSes and becomes even more irregular with multiboot/multipartition scenarios.

Also

so I renamed it C:\

is confusing because changing a drive letter assignment and giving a partition a name or label are two different things. Drive letter assignments should only be done using Windows own Disk Management under Win2K/XP and Windows will not let your change the drive letter of either the boot partition (contains the windows folder) nor the system partition (the active partition). You can force such changes using PM but the results are unpredictable and often fatal.

So

How can I reverse the names of C & D while running XP?

Well the short answer is you can't since one of them must be either the sytem and/or the boot partition and that letter cannot be changed. If it really really matters (cant think why) then you can force the change with PM and then run a repair (or in place upgrade) installation over the original WinXP but no guarantees at all that this would work. The only way to be sure of installing Win2K or WinXP onto a C drive is to do a clean installation into a newly created primary partition on HDD-0 AND AT A TIME WHEN ALL OTHER PARTITIONS ARE COMPLETELY HIDDEN.

[youngsw]

Drive letter assignments should only be done using Windows own Disk Management under Win2K/XP and Windows will not let your change the drive letter of either the boot partition (contains the windows folder) nor the system partition (the active partition).

That post was full of useful information, I learned something new today.

[Sheila Qwann]

Thanks for the replies, especially Paul for taking so much time on this. I did try to change the drive letter assignment in XP's Disk Management & as you said found out you cannot do so with the system (XP's D) or boot (XP's C) partitions. I guess it doesn't make any difference operationally, so the easiest thing is to ignore the difference. Maybe I'll just re-label the 3 partitions on each OS with lables that match and have more meaning than a letter (like "win2k", "storage" & XP)

Thank you again

Sheila

[Paul Komski]

Yep - giving the drive labels meaningful names is a very good habit to get into. It helps to make it clear which partition is which especially when you have multiple partitions. The other time it can really help out is when you acccess the drive from DOS or from Setup, etc, when it may prevent you from deleting or formatting the wrong partition by mistacke; and so on.