Letter assignment

[Zonie]

I have a client's laptop, Gateway (Model 400VTX), wtih bad hard drive. No problem replaced and loaded XP Home. During OS install, showed being installed to :\windows. When I booted the system the drive letter changed to f:\. I then discovered there is a flash card reader in the laptop. Apparently this is causing the problem. My question is how the heck do you stop this drive letter assignment ;so the OS is showing c:\ instead of f:\?????

I would hate to think I have to tear the laptop apart and disconnect this card reader and reload the OS especially since I don't have a manual to show how to pull this apart. Any help will be greatly appreciated. TIA

[CCT]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307844

[Zonie]

Thank you for the response CCT, however per your link the following quote:

Changing the drive letter of the system volume or the boot volume is not a built-in feature of the Disk Management snap-in.

[Ferrit]

When you first go to the partition area where it shows your harddrive in the setup.
Thats where you have to repartition it and watch very very closely that it assigns the letter C to the first partition. If it doesn't, redo it again till it does.
It may be possible to disable the reader in bios as well but of that its only a slim possibility

[CCT]

If the flash card reader is set as a bootable device in bios, then you may not be able to change the drive letter.

So, make sure it isn't set as a bootable device, and only the A: flopppy drive, CD/DVD and HDD0 are.

Then do what ferrit said.

[Zonie]

Thank you both for the info. I will give this a try later, off to see a client who was borke into and all the PC's were stolen. Big job ahead. Will let you know what transpires when I get back and try the suggestions.

[emr]

You can change the system drive letter; I have done it myself before.

I used this walkthrough.

[Matridom]

You can change the system drive letter; I have done it myself before.

I used this walkthrough.

you know EMR, it's been a year plus since that article was published and the entire time, i always did a windows re-install to fix that, Thanks for the find!

[Zonie]

You can change the system drive letter; I have done it myself before.

I used this walkthrough.

Well I changed the registry per the instructions and went to reboot abd found the system would only go as far as the splash screen. I then did a repair install hoping for the best and knowing I had nothing to lose. After the repair install, the system came back up and now the drive letter is correct. Thank you for all your help.