Drive letters arrangement

[Lockheed]

My partition arrangement is C: (Xp), d: (data) and at the end of the disk E: (2k8).

I have installed windows 2008 on E: so when I start the system it becomes C:.

Now, what I would want is the XP partitions becoming either E: or invisible. However, Disk Manager in Administrative Tools of win2k8 won’t allow me to change the letter of the partition with XP and so it remains as D:, which I want to reserve for the Data partition.

Is there any way I can change the letter of XP’s partition under windows 2008?

[fizban2]

Windows will always assign the partition that you install windows to as C:

this is independent of what windows XP sees. disk manager should allow you to assign any drive letter that is not in use to that drive. what error do you get when you assign a drive letter?

[Mr Snrub]

When talking about partitions you need to forget drive letters and look at 2 main things:

1. which is the active (system) partition your system started from

2. which is the (boot) partition the current instance of Windows is installed on

In your case, you have 3 partitions:

Partition 0 = system partition, and boot partition for Windows XP

Partition 1 = data partition

Partition 2 = boot partition for Windows 2008

When the computer starts, the BIOS locates the active partition from which to load the boot manager, then the boot loader is selected (interactively, as you have 2 boot loader entries).

The boot loader points to the partition where Windows is installed and the main part of the boot process takes place.

In the case of selecting XP, everything happens on the first partition so the drive letters are

Partition 0 = C: (system, boot)

Partition 1 = D:

Partition 2 = E:

In the case of selecting W2K8, the boot process starts on partition 0 and resumes on the boot partition 2, so the following is the enumeration order:

Partition 2 = C: (boot)

Partition 0 = D: (system)

Partition 1 = E:

(As fizban2 pointed out, regardless of the target partition for which Windows will be installed, it will be C: by default - AFAIK you can't change this through a regular setup and it can only be defined to another letter through a scripted installation.)

When booted into Windows, you cannot change the drive letter of either the system or boot partitions (this has always been the case), which is why when booted into W2K8 you can't reassign C: or D:.

[Lockheed]

I know I can't reasign C:. However, when I gave 2k8 the first try, a month ago, the partition layout was the same, but it somehow set DATA partition to D automaticly. I don't know how it happend and how to repeat this process.

[killerb255]

WARNING: Not responsible for any weird cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs stuff that happens as a result of this.

If you want to change the drive letters when it doesn't let you normally through Disk Management:

In Server 2008:

regedit

HKLM\System\MountedDevices

Change \DosDevices\D: to \DosDevices\some unused drive letter:

Change \DosDevices\E: to \DosDevices\D:

Change \DosDevices\whatever unused drive letter you used to \DosDevices\E:

Reboot.