drive letters

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rookie1010

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I have finally installed two copies of Windows XP on two seperate drives.
but my drive letters are all over the place.
i have C,E,F,G and J for disk 1
and H and I for disk 2

is there any way i can reassign the labels

the other question i have is i bought a 160 hard drive, and this is the space i have got out of it
14.6 + 14.6 + 19.5 + 79.1 + 21.0 = 148.8 Gigs
where have my precious 11.2 Gigs gone
 
most system drives (1 for each installation) will not allow you to change the letter. And if they do...i wouldn't do it..can you say corrupted?

as far as the others, right click on "My Computer" and click manage. Go into the Drive management option and go to the properties of the drive in question and change the letter. You may have to finagle (?) your way around to get the desired letters because each letter can only be used once (obviously)



now about the size of the drive...i believe each partition uses some space for it's allocation tables and headers and whatnot. I realize 11gb is alot, but i believe it uses percentages somehow, thought not positive.

on top of this, 160gb is not truly 160gb, just like 128mb = 131mb or if you check the properties of a drive, for instance on mine, it says 61b free space, but when it shows the actual bytes, it's really 65,535,xxx,xxx bytes which would indicate 65gb


...go figure
 
thanks for the advice
which drives will not get corrupted and which will when i try to change the drive letters
 
Hey Obeseso,

what exactly does this mean?? You got me wondering,,never heard of such a thing before

"most system drives (1 for each installation) will not allow you to change the letter. And if they do...i wouldn't do it..can you say corrupted?"

Give an example would ya?
 
have C,E,F,G and J for disk 1
you forgot to do logical drive to attribute the drive letters, go back to BIOS when you do primary partition,extended partition then logical dos drive etc....
 
what exactly does this mean?? You got me wondering,,never heard of such a thing before

well, if you boot into xp...and it boots to C: for instance...when you try to change the letter, XP gives a message "Windows cannot modify the drive letter of your system volume or boot volume"

secondly, you may be able to modify the system drive of the "other" boot drive (for instance, his second installation of XP), but I would not do this...during that installation, the registry has references to the specific drive letter it was installed on (thus causing corruptions when you boot to it)


all data drives should be no problem changing
 
a faster way to get into disk management is get to a run box and type diskmgmt.msc. the only drive you cannot change drive letters or format is the "system partition" on a basic MBR disk. odessabo is right your 148.8GB disk is not missing 11.2GB. this is your true disk size
 
thanks dudes
i have changed the label for partitions now.
i will see if my second windows xp works. if not, i guess i will just need to reinstall windows xp for that partition.
 
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