(C:) hard drive

after installing a new hard drive in my pc i now have the hd assign with (I & removable disk as (c i cant rename it or remove it how can i switch this around so the hd is (C drive & delete the removable disk cause there isnt one ....thanks

 

Hi thudude

As far as I know you assign the drive letter as C: when you first install windows, however it can be changed (not easily).



It is on the blue setup screen above where you choose which drive / partition to install windows to. If you only have the one hard drive in your system on your install, it will automatically asign the drive letter C: if its the ONLY partition / drive detected on install.

It usually asigns a different letter if it finds other active partitions / drives when you first install windows.

My tip is to remove ALL other drives from your PC when you install windows, and only use the new blank drive.



Then create the partition (like in the screenshot above) and format it using NTFS, and this will now be assigned the letter C:



This is as far as I know the only (easy and safe) way to ensure that your main drive is allocated the drive letter C: as I dont know if you can change the letter of the system / boot volume.

There are a few articles here and here on how to do this if you dont want to do a full install. Personally If the install is fairly new and there isnt much on the drive I would start from scratch.

 

thanks for the quick reply , it was my first time installing hd & i ran into a lot of problems ,its just that there were a lot of option when i was installing windows & just guessed on a few of them i probaply made the wrong choice.. so maybe i should reinstall it & partition it ..thanks

 

No worries, make sure you have all other drives unplugged from the system (IDE, SATA and USB) and make sure you delete any existing partitions first!

Just let us know how you get on ;o)

 

The drive that windows is installed on will ALWAYS be (C. Make sure you know which drive you're installing the OS on. The drive will usually be listed by it's modl number, that should give you a clue as to which hard drive it is.

 

i reinstalled xp & i took my time & did what you said & its all corrected now ..thanks

 

Sorry sam thats not right. In this instance he already had a device / partition when he installed windows and so allocated a different drive letter. This happens commonly, especially if you have usb devices such as card readers / portable hard drives installed and dont have them removed when you first run the install.

God knows I have done it once before!

 

Interesting. I've done the exact same and never turned up with C. The letters just got changed around after windows was installed. Go to reformat a partition with windows on it and it could end up wuth any letter, even though you know it as C: !

 

Yeah it only tends to happen if setup recognises a hard drive in the system with an already existing master boot record.