[bobcox]

I installed a new hard drive and it installed as the F drive and one of the USB ports is now the C drive. Needless to say lots of things don't work because most everything looks for rthe drivers on the C drive. Is there any way to correct this wihout stripping the system and reloading Windows?

thanx

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Unfortunately not.
You can't change the boot drive letter in XP when it's already installed. You will have to reinstall Windows again, I'm afraid.

[Neil Jones]

Unfortunately not.
You can't change the boot drive letter in XP when it's already installed. You will have to reinstall Windows again, I'm afraid.

[Samm]

Actually you can with XP, or at least, you can change it back to the original letter (C in this case).

However, this involves making changes to the registry & is not without risk, therefore I'm just going to point you to the relevant Microsoft article. Use it at your own risk....

Restoring system drive letter

[Neil Jones]

Notice in the third paragraph of the linked Microsoft article, most important in bold:

For the most part, this [changing the boot drive letter] is not recommended, especially if the drive letter is the same as when Windows was installed. The only time that you may want to do this is when the drive letters get changed without any user intervention. This may happen when you break a mirror volume or there is a drive configuration change. This should be a rare occurrence and you should change the drive letters back to match the initial installation.

Therefore Microsoft's advice if you do need to do this is only to do it if Windows screws it up, and if you do change it, you are recommended to change it back to the original letter, in the OP's case, Drive F. The registry edit is quite dangerous and if something goes wrong, you'll have to reinstall anyway.

[Troy]

I read the OP's post as saying that the OS install was initially C:, then after installing another hard drive things got mucked up. If that's the case then Samm's link should work.

P.S. SAMM!!