[charles.actuary]

I have a Dell Dimension 5150 running Windows XP. It came with 2 SATA hard disks installed.

The C: disk (with Windows installed) has recently failed. I have bought a replacement, same specification, and reinstalled Windows on it. All good, except the drive now calls itself I:, which makes life unnecessarily complex. The other hard drive now calls itself C: - I had left it out while I was installing the new drive, in case I accidentally installed Windows on the wrong drive. All the other drives (CD, DVD, memory card) have reorganised themselves as well.

Is this an easy thing to correct, or am I going to have to restart installation from the beginning?

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I've seen this happen a lot on computers that have a card reader installed, which is what I bet you have. Unfortunately you can't just rename the drive to C because there are way too many settings in the registry that would still be pointing to I and therefore would cause Windows to be very unstable if not unbootable altogether. The only course of action you have is to remove that old hard drive once again, and also remove all card reader connections from the motherboard; leaving only the CD-ROM drive and the new hard drive connected, and reinstalling Windows XP again.

Fenor

Edited by Fenor, 20 September 2008 - 06:08 AM.

[Fenor]

I've seen this happen a lot on computers that have a card reader installed, which is what I bet you have. Unfortunately you can't just rename the drive to C because there are way too many settings in the registry that would still be pointing to I and therefore would cause Windows to be very unstable if not unbootable altogether. The only course of action you have is to remove that old hard drive once again, and also remove all card reader connections from the motherboard; leaving only the CD-ROM drive and the new hard drive connected, and reinstalling Windows XP again.

Fenor

Edited by Fenor, 20 September 2008 - 06:08 AM.

[The Admiral]

I agree. Windows Setup will look for hard drives in a particular order, and internal card readers and card readers in printers and external drives get mapped first. Do not Google "how to change the boot drive letter" - it will give you instructions that will break your computer. Trust me - I've tried.
Pop open the case, and there's just one cord that goes from the motherboard to the card reader, unplug that before installing Windows, and you'll be good to go.

[charles.actuary]

Excellent! I followed your instructions, and now have all the discs and readers installed where they should be.

Thank you very much

Charles

[Fenor]

Glad I could help!

Fenor