Is it safe to use regedit to reaasign my primary drive letter? I bought a new drive as the other one was a little suspect. Installed Hitachi 80gb as main cable select, partitioned it into 2x40 and reinstalled XP. I used the western digital 40gb as a slave with jumpers set to slave.
My primary drive is now allocated F the slave is C. I can change the slave using drive management but need to use HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices to allocate F back to C. The main reason is quite a bit of software will only install on C which is usually the primary.
Will this screw everything up because it has all the windows files with the address F:\whatever if I do this?

i would use Maxtor blast 4
( http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Ma...&downloadID=58 ) as jephree sugested for me to use a while back (this was for something else, but i remember seeing the function to change drive letters)

however, i'm not sure about the regedit, someone else could probably tell you that

Was the Western Digital the suspect drive? With the previous XP?

First off I would recommend if you are using the Cable Select jumper on one drive you should use it on both.

Next from my reading I am seeing that the notion of C: being the System Drive under NTFS is moot.

That being said I see that running a Repair Install is probably the easiest/safest way to change this.

I would recommend removing the old/slave drive during the reinstall (espescially if it has XP on it).

Also from what I read in regards to your specific question: editing the registry here is very questionable unless you are restoring your system to a previous state.

This is what I have been reading:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...;EN-US;q223188

DONT'T!!! try the procedure detailed in Q233188 (quoted below). It is
for restoring drive letters to their *original* settings only. Read the
summary in Q233188 *very* carefully and/or my post in the thread
"Changing Drive Letters on HD's" in this NG. Also, read all the posts in
all the threads on this subject and note that everyone who tried the
procedure in Q233188 ended up with an unbootable system.

http://groups.google.com/group/micro...50d290722925a0

http://groups.google.com/group/micro...r+of+os&qt_g=1

Hope this helps.

So you suggest leaving it as is for now Jephree?

The western digital is the suspect one, it lost the boot sector and I had to use the recovery cd. There were a lot of remnants left on it that I couldnt see and instead of wiping the drive like the recovery cd said it would it installed over the top and renamed all the users to old like all users.windows. I thought it safer to buy a new drive and start from scratch.

The Hitachi drive which I did the fresh install on is called local disk F so you're saying it doesnt have to be C? Its only some programs that insist on installing their base stuff on C. While this isnt a problem, if that drive goes belly up eventually, I'll have to reinstall heaps of programs.

I think I will do a reinstall again, they say 3rd time lucky. I just thought it strange that it would call the old drive C. I've installed on heaps of computers with slaves and this a first. With the slave disconnected, the drive boots up fine so I'll plan a reinstall one day just for the programs sake.

As far as I know (which isn't too far) the letters are set automatically during the install.

If there was a C: already present (on any drive) then a different letter would be assigned.

As madmikejt12 points out Maxtor has a cloning program for its' drives but I don't see any such thing for Hitachi. Of course there are third party programs to clone/ghost the drive. You would copy over all the XP errors as well but could then repair XP afterwards.
The advantage there of copying over all your programs.

Otherwise I think you are OK as is.

My guess is that if you reinstall/repair XP on the new drive with the old drive removed then XP will be C:
Then on reinstalling the old drive that old C: will change to F:

LOL Thanks Jephree, as I read on the google groups it said 'learn to love the letters Windows assigns.