New drive boots as E

[Ham]

A friend had a drive crash and got a replacement drive from Dell. He reinstalled a bunch of stuff and then asked for some assistance on some other issues. I was quite surprised that when I booted up his machine, his main (and only) disk came up as E. I know I can change that back to C via the Disk Management, but will everything have to be reinstalled or will pointers & paths be changed also?

Thanks. -- Ham

 

[G0AOZ]

No, all programmes will still look for the E: drive. Leave it as it is assuming it's working ok. This situation suggests there might have been existing partitions on the HDD or a ZIP drive, or similar, was connected when the new installation took place...

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[Ham]

Thank you - I was sort of afraid of that. It does work fine. They do have a removable disk for back up, and that was probably connected. It isn't now. I did connect another drive via USB, and it was tagged as C. This does create some confusion - I'm not used to treating C as an auxilliary drive.

Thanks again. -- Ham

 

[linney]

Overview of PNP enumeration and hard disk drive letter assignments in Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q825668#appliesto

 

[dnevill]

I had this problem when I replaced my drive with a larger hard drive. It comes down to the removable or zip drives taking precedence over the internal drives. The fix was to unplug or disconnect all the removable drives and reinstall windows. After windows was installed, reconnect the removable(zip) drives and all would be well again. This renamed my hard drive C: and my zip drive F: instead of the other way around.