reassigning drive letters

[fabulouscoops]

greetings.

I just did an installation of Windows XP on a new hard drive (Western Digital 40 GB IDE 2 MB buffer), replacing the broken drive C in a 3 year old Gateway. There are two optical drives, a 250 MB zip drive and a floppy drive. Windows assigned letter F: to the new drive even though there is no other hard drive. (The Zip drive is on the same ribbon cable.)

The user wants the boot drive to say C:
I have looked up how to do this and for non-boot drives, the task can be accomplished in Disk Management. However, for boot drives, they warn that the drive could become unbootable.
Is there a way to change the drive letter without reinstalling Windows?

Thanks for your replies.

[redduc900]

How To Restore the System/Boot Drive Letter in Windows
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;223188
This article describes how to change the system or boot drive letter in Windows. For the most part, this 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.

[fabulouscoops]

Thanks, I saw that but was hoping for a "trick" someone here might know. I will post back with an outcome.

[KillrBuckeye]

Another thing you might want to try is disconnecting all devices except the hard drive with the fresh Windows installation and booting up. This *might* reassign the drive letter as C:. Then, when you reconnect the other devices, it should remain as C:.

Did you have the old hard drive attached when you were installing Windows on the new hard drive (I realize it's not attached now)? Usually this drive letter problem will only occur if Windows setup detects another hard drive with an existing Windows installation. For this reason, when installing Windows it's always a good idea to disconnect all devices except the drive to which it is being installed and the optical drive with the CD.

[jiggamanjb]

I was doing somewhat of the same thing. I read all the articles and basically you can lose everything by trying this, so for me it wasn't worth it. What I did was change all the other drives to letters higher that the main drive. It think the HD was F:, then put the other drives and like M:, N:, .... then at least the HD was first. Also, Partition Magic will change the drive to C:, but you still run the same risks.

[fabulouscoops]

The old hard drive was not attached. Although, alfter I got windows installed, I hooked up the old drive as a slave to see if I could get any data from it. It came up as C but could not be accessed.
Windows assigned the Floppy to A the zip drive to C the optical drives to D and E and the new hard drive to F.
I tried the regedit method above after reassigning the zip drive to G. The disk did indeed change to C from F but was unbootable. I did a repair install of Windows and all is well.