Changing Drive Letter of System Drive - How?

[sbev]

I screwed up installing a second drive and ended up with no drive C. The system/boot drive is D, e & F are CD drives and G is the slave drive. The OS is Win 2000. I want to change drive letter D to C and then I can change G to D; however, Disk Management won't let me change drive letter D. It gives the error message that drive letter changes to system or boot volumes are not allowed. There are problems to not having a drive C, one of which is the inability to install certain software. Any help appreciated.

 

[wolluf]

1. Don't really understand how installing a second drive 'moved' system drive from C: to D: - care to elaborate?

2. You can obviously back up & start from scratch.

3.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q223188&

tells you how to change system drive letter - not recommended.
You might find

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;q234048&

intersting.

 

[sbev]

I'm not quite sure how the ball-up occurred as I was adding a disk, switching from RAID to IDE and cloning the old on the new. I ended up with the old drive (still bootable) on C and the new drive on D. I switched the old drive to H but can't switch the new one to C. Thanks for the help but so far it's no go. I tried the MS suggestion you linked but as you and they say its not a smart move. I ended up unable to log on after changing the drive letter with the problem described in Q249321. I'm not on a network so couldn't try most of the fixes and fdisk /mbr didn't work. I restored the drive image and am now back where I started -- no C drive.

 

[wolluf]

Have you tried imaging the new disk & booting it on its own (ie, no other drives in PC). If that makes system drive C: you can put second drive back later.