HardDrive heirarchy and drive letters..

[basepointdesignz]

Hi,

I know that this could be very simple to overcome but it doesn't appear so, not with my new pc..

I have one harddrive in SATA1 of the motherboard which shows up as the C drive and the other harddrive in SATA2 on the motherboard which shows up as the E drive, as the dvd-drive is already set to drive D..

I have tried to swap the SATA cables so that the E drive is in slot SATA1 and the C is in SATA2 but whenever i boot, it says 'DISK BOOT FAILURE.......'

...all i want is to have the E drive as the C drive because i have a lot of work related VBA programs which i use at one of my clients place too and i want the hardcoded paths to match..

Is there anything that would not allow me to just simply swap the drive heirarchy over or am i just missing somehting simple?



Cheers,

Paul
basepointdesignzltd..
XP Pro 64-Bit & 32-Bit..
Pentium Core 2 Q6600 Quad Core
ASUS P5N-E SLI Motherboard
4GB DDR2 RAM
2 x SLI NVIDIA 8500GT SLi 1024MB DDR2 PCI-Express Graphics Cards

 

[Nelviticus]

When Windows XP boots it reads the boot.ini file (I think this is from the first disk in the heirarchy but I'm not sure) and this tells it where to find its startup files. If you look at boot.ini (it's a hidden file in the root of your C drive) you'll see that the format is something like 'multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)'.

This tells it the controller, port, disk and partition to boot from. Once it has this info it reads the registry to find what drive letters to give to the various drives and partitions, then continues to boot.

The registry is full of entries that point to the C drive. If you change the C drive all these entries will be wrong and it will all fall down.

You just can't change the letter of a Windows boot drive after the OS has been installed. I tried it once - replacing every reference to C:\ in my registry with D:\ - and it sort of worked but the system was pretty unstable. I ended up just re-installing.

You could try two things:
- Move all the stuff that has hard-coded paths from your E drive to your new C drive, or
- Do a fresh install of Windows onto the drive that contains your other files (making sure you don't format it first!)

Nelviticus