Drive letter assignment?

[TechSupp]

Fixing a friends computer and after fixing the MBR to get it to boot noticed its set as H: drive! Never had a windows boot drive as h: only c:. It set as master so where does it assign it to H:? Not too bothered as its up and running (and booting!) but sure would not like mine to be that way knowing hos some software does not like that boot drive letter anything other than c:! I cant change it as all the existing software would point to h: but if I was to reinstall how could I reset it to c:. Its a Gigabyte MB with Sata and IDE raid options but its only a single disk....Thinks....thinks more....am I correct in thinking that raid options are reserving C,D and E,F and G for raid and is that wide of the mark?

[imiddleton25]

dos it have a card reader in built?? we have had problems were driver letters were reserved by other usb card reader ports

[sparkeh]

Yes this can happen when you have other devices, such as card readers, present during Windows installation, its nothing to do with RAID (which presents the disks as a single volume and would depend on how you partition that yourself). edit: of course unless it has been partitioned in an interesting way...

If you can disconnect any of these kind of things then Windows will install on c:

Edited December 14, 2010 by sparkeh

[mac_shinobi]

just a thought - not sure if this is advisable or no ( some confirmation on this please )

 

Right click on my computer --> Manage --> disk management --> Right click on the main drive ( H: ) and click on change drive letter and assign it the letter C if C is in the drop down menu and apply that.

 

If it is not available then you should be able to see what is using C ?

[TechSupp]

Think imiddleton hit the point, forgot that the DVD drive has some inbuilt memory card slots in it, which would match to C,D,E,F and G!!!!! Low and behold next one would be H for the HD. Mystery Solved. Thnaks

[srochford]

@mac_shinobi - you really, really, really don't want to change the drive letter after it's installed. Windows will almost certainly fail to boot and you're then into nightmare scenarios of off-line registry editing to get it all going again :-)

 

I would leave well alone - it's just one of those mysteries that happens sometimes (typically, something else grabbed the drive letters before install as others have said. If you have any software which insists on using drive c: then it's just not going to work (although if that happened you might be able to get away with doing a subst C: H:\ before the install starts to bodge it)