Boot volume and system volume?

[Scant7]

Hi, I have two hard drives I use, an SATA 80GB C: and a WD 120 IDE D:. I use the SATA to install windows and all my apps and all my games. I use the WD to store movies.

I reformatted my HDD earlier today and reinstalled windows. When all was said and done, I realized my computer installed windows on drive D. So I checked it out and drive D has become my SATA 80GB and my drive name C: got moved to my WD 120 HD. I tried changing the drive letters back to how they were earlier, but I got a message saying windows cannot change drive letters on system volume and boot volume.

So I read about these volumes and how where windows gets installed is called the boot volume and the rest of windows and apps would be stalled on the system volume. I don't understand how my hard drive for storing movies has become my system volume. Does anyone know how I can make drive D:, my SATA HDD, the system and boot volume? Does it even matter will performance be effected?

[redduc900]

Windows setup will see the WD HDD as C: because it's connected via the onboard IDE controller. Any HDD's connected via the onboard SATA controller will be seen by Setup (as long as needed drivers for the controller are either natively supplied, or are supplied via the F6 screen)... but in order to have the 80GB SATA HDD seen as C:, the onboard IDE controller (the one w/ the WD connected) will have to be disabled via the BIOS. After Setup reboots the first time, and you re-enter the BIOS to change your boot order to - Floppy / Hard Disk / CDROM, you can re-enable the onboard IDE controller. Setup will always use the first HDD it sees attached to an onboard IDE controller (as opposed to a SATA or RAID controller) as the root directory C:.

**You may have an option in your BIOS to change the HDD boot device priority to - SATA / IDE... if that's the case then the HDD on the IDE controller won't need to be disabled, and Setup will use the SATA HDD as C: (as long as it's set as the primary / first boot device). This is normally a seperate BIOS option, as compared to the normal Boot Device / Order option.

Edit: I guess I should've also included this...

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.

[Treker]

should be an easy fix?

Have you tried going into control panel, admin tools, computer management, go down to disk management, right click on the disk you want to change it's drive letter ?

[Scant7]

Yeah, it wouldn't let me change the volume names. I ended up reformatting and reinstalling windows again, no biggy. Thanks for the help.