I was wondering how one can FORCE XP to use Custom Drive letters when installing it directly from XP bootCD.

Lemme explain my query better. I always like to have 2 copies of windows installed.

I have 3 SATA hard disks. 400gb + 400gb + 400.

First SATA master is the System HDD on which I install all my OS’s.

I keep 4 partitions lettered as:

C: for Primary OS, 100gb

G: All games installed in this & not usual C:\programfiles\xxx, 200gb

K: for Alternate install of XP or XP x64 or Windows 2003 server, 50gb

V: for Vista, 50gb

Second SATA (set to Drive letter D) is a 400gb single partition Containing my Game’s & software Dump’s etc.

Third SATA (set to Drive letter E) is 400gb single partition for all my songs & movies dumped.

I always like to keep this setup this way. If I wanna dual boot x86 Xpsp2 with a 32bit XP/ XP-MCE or Vista I can preserve those Drive letters since I can start the setup from within primary XP.

The problem is say I wanna install x64 XP or x64 Vista, I only can clean install it from a BOOT CD & then it messes up all my Drive letters. I can edit some of the drive letters but the secondary x64 OS takes the 2nd drive letter of First system hard disk as D & I can’t change it anyway as it gets reserved for Booting. But then it’s a really pain to work on the second OS with D being E, E being F, K or V being D etc…..

May be I used a lil long convo here to state my query but I think its better to be descriptive at the First shot rather than posting multiple replies later.

Now coming back to the quest. Is there a way, using some answer file from Floppy or something else where I can force tell the New secondary OS to use the Drive letter schema of my choice ??

Thx for reading that long, looking forward for the views….

that seems little weird

leave it watever windows do, once installed go to Computer managemnt Console

Select disk management

umount all partitions including optical and usb storages.

by Selecting "Change drive letter and paths"

remove exisiting drive letter

so all the drive letters will be free (except c: drive , u cant unmount it)

Then select the parition u want to change the drive letter and assign new drive letter accordingly

dont 4get the optical drives