re-label drives

[bpmax]

Somebody along the way told me, when using multipe HD's (or partitions), always put your OS on the first, C:

I travelled to a friend's house tonite with my 160g external drive... to give him some mp3 files and make some CDs for him.

He runs XPpro on his 2 systems.

System 1 acceped the new drive (my external) fine and installed the driver perfectly. No problems with or without the USB based HD.

System 2 also (seemingly) accepted the driver for my external well, and burned the data to CD very well... and a good time was had by all.


Upon re-start of that system, not only did it not recognize my external, his system showed a generic installer icon on his C: drive upon a "my computer" init. A double click on said icon asked which progs to install. (WP8, and 2 others I have never seen) None of the options seemed to have any available options to correct an obvious problem. C: worked fine with "explore" option, but not on a basic dbl clk.


I felt that I would be viewed as "responsible for this melt down", so I looked everywhere in the sys that made sense... in the C: drive, for some kind of sys. association for the bullshit occuring on his sys. (dispite the fact that I know NOTHING about XP, and use 98se) About an hour passed... and nothing. (Aside from me gaining a new insight to XP)

I asked a few more questions about the system, after getting absolutely nowhere. Turns out that my friend's OS is on his #2 HD... labeled F: (I asked him that after I found no prog files in C:. He uses C: as the data backup drive... and a shop here in NM set it up that way.

His sys lays out as:
A: floppy
C: local disk (data)
D: cd rom/burner
E: DVD
F: local disk (OS)
G: (some kind of data reader, flash, or the like)
H: (not recognized upon re-start, but following several CD burns, WAS my external drive)

At any rate... his OS was on F:, and the Corel associated installer, in part, found it's way from his F: to his C:.

Seems my H: confused the shit out of his XP install. As soon as the Corel installer components were located and removed from C: (after we made the mental connection), a re-start restored the system to normal operation.

I didn't bother to try to re-connect my drive after this catastrophe. I was just glad his system worked as it should.

Anywho... a buddy of mine at another forum suggested the use of XP's administrative tools. He said:

" With XP if you go to

"administrative tools"
"computer management"
"disk management"

Right Click on "under all tasks"

you can change the drive letters and paths"

What I want to know is this: Since his system already associates it's OS and program files with drive F:, is changing the drive letters gonna really screw things up? Does XP actually go in and change the 'hard-code' of those proggies to associate them to C:, since relabeling them would essentially keep all the files (physically) in the same place, but have new associations.

I'm (naturally) a little bit skeptical about suggesting the initiation of the re-label. Does anyone have any personal experience with this matter? I'd rather he not have to re-format... but if this happened with the introduction of an external HD to his system, theoretically, it could happen with a zip drive or any other hardware he attatches to it.

Thanks in advance for any advice or knowledge of what the re-labeling that "administrative tools" offers actually performs.

[greffov]

The problem probably arose when you booted with the external drive connected. Windows probably decided it had to change the drive letters and stuff. Does it fix itself if you boot without the drive again? If not you'll have to set back the disk labels yourself manually.

General advice: never boot with your usb disk attached.

[igalan]

Did you try to boot with last good configuration (pressing F8 before boot starts)? Did you try a system restore? Any of that should have left everything as if nothing happened unless something really bad happened.

[rastagard]

I do lot of ghosting and sometimes I have to remove drives and boot up with fewer than my normal number. It has happened in the past that when returning to my normal configuration, the drive letters were switched.


You can run Norton WinDoctor to fix it (fair to midland job) or you can run Partition Magic Drive Mapper. (manual setup but changes everything back and make sure everything points in the right direstion again)


Windows is funny about stuff sometimes, I have found it will act differently under identical (seemingly) circumstances.


Good to see ya here, bp..............

[bpmax]

Thanks for the responses, folks!

(Good to see you, too Rasta!)The ripper and the sniffer got me to take a peek in here again the other day.

Since the installer files from corel that magically migrated C: (his data drive)were removed from that drive, the system has operated normally since.

I'm just concerned that, since his OS is located on F: instead of C:, (where it should have been installed in the first place) that any time he hooks up an outboard device or any other drive, for that matter, there is a lot of potential for this type of scenario to occur again. Know what I mean?

I'm really interested to know if anyone has used XP's administrative tools/disk management feature to re-label... and if so what it really does...

One would think that in order for this re-labeling to work, that Disk Management would have to accomplish a lot of things. ie: re-associate all OS and prog files to a different drive letter in the registry. If it doesn't perform such tasks, the system would likely go "apeshit" (to quote a friend) on the next boot, right?

The bottom line is, his OS and prog. files REALLY should be on C:... and that's what we're trying to accomplish without a reformat of both of those drives.

I just question the comprehensiveness of XP's disk management feature... as I have never used it before. If the two drives were just data storage tanks, I wouldn't hesitate to use the feature... but since one of the drives is his OS...

I'm sure ya'll see where I'm going with this.

[rastagard]

Ya know, I completely forgot about all this. When I first tried my freshly aquired copy of XP, I wasn't sure what to expect so I dual booted with 98. I forgot all about this till now, but it let me install the OS on my D drive. It does however install all your boot files to C. I may be wrong here, but you might just be able to copy the windows folder over to C. Maybe someone else could suggest how to do that, and whether it is wise.


The disk management tools in Administrative Tools are fairly basic although they work well.They will change the drive letter, but not any of the old paths. They won't let you do something stupid like Partition Magic will. hehe. I think most of us have learned that the hard way. If you have PM, the only tool I really use it for is the drive mapper. This little tool will root out all the old paths for a changed drive letter and change them to the new letter. It is a very useful tool. I have switched to Acronis Partition Expert for everything else. It beats PM hands down IMO.

[bpmax]

My friend with this XP issue came up with a pretty damn good idea:

Quote:
"Re the computer dilemma. I think that I am going to disconnect the data C: drive, then go into the CMOS and see if I can label the other hard drive as C:
If it screws it up, I will simply reformat the drive with my programs on it. I won't have to worry about my files."

That seems like a sensible thing to do in this situation. It prevents anything from going drastically wrong, and when he re-connects the data drive, XP will simply sense a new drive and give it a label.

Thanks for the input, folks.

I'll let you know how it goes.

[bpmax]

Originally posted by bpmax


I'll let you know how it goes.

No dice... He tried the procedure that I mentioned above and had no luck in CMOS. So... he's just gonna disconnect the data drive again and re-format his OS drive...

It was worth a try though. THX again for all the suggests.

Now... on to my own problem.

[greffov]

hmmmm, ok.

Sorry to hear it doesn't work out in a normal way ...

[bpmax]

Originally posted by greffov
Sorry to hear it doesn't work out in a normal way ...

That is normal for Microsoft... isn't it?

[greffov]

ohw... yeah, I almost forgot... I am not using it

[dalert0140]

i wold use Rasta's first suggestion to use Partition Magic 's Drive Mapper.If i remember correctly it searches the drive for references to the drive (F: in this case,i think)and changes them to what they should be (C.As far as I know the windows utility that comes in XP cannot change the labels in the drives beacuse C: (or F: in the case of your friend) are in use.