Why is my boot drive showing up as drive J:?

Sam

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I am building a Media Computer using WIN XP Media Center 2005 OS. The computer has
two DVD drives and two SATA hard drives. The MB is an ASUS M3A78 PRO.

Now, every time I install windows it makes the C:, D:, E: & F: drives as removable drives.
There are none installed! Then it makes the two DVD drives G: & H:. Lastly, it makes
the larger hard drive the I: drive and the smaller BOOT drive as the J: drive.

I don't understand why this is happening. I would prefer the conventional assignment
of drive letters being the BOOT drive as C:, the second drive D:, the DVD drives as E: &
F: and as to the removable drives, I have none so do not want to assign drive letters
for them until such time as I may use an external drive or memory stick.

Can someone help me out and shed some light on what I am doing wrong?

...>>Sam
 

jerrardo

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I have a similar thing happen. My boot drive was the last of all of my hard drives, but it didn't end up after the dvd drive. You can reassign drive letters in XP. I think it is under Control Panel>Admin Tools>Computer Mgmt> Storage>Disk Management. I'm not an admin on this computer so I can't get any further, but after that you should be able to change the drive letters.

Are you sure the C,D,E,F drives aren't a card reader?
 

Sam

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Yes Jerrardo you hit the nail right on the head with the card reader. The Media case that I bought does have a four slot card reader. I never thought
of that. I would think that the simple solution to those four is to unplug the reader before installing the OS. However, I could not do this with the DVDs as they are needed to do the install.

I am famaliar with the procedure to reassign drive letters but I would think
that if I reassigned the BOOT drive, I would likely have trouble as I would
think that during the OS installation everything would be tied to say the J:
drive and if I then made it the C: drive things would not work.

I have watched the OS installation closely and have seen nothing that
would suggest that I could force installation to the C: drive. I wonder
if there could be something in the MB BIOS settings that could influence
which drive becomes the BOOT drive?

Thanks for your input.

...>>Sam
 
I think that what is happening is that the drive letters are being assigned in the order that they are detected. You can either shuffle the drive cables around so that the boot drive (C:\) is plugged into the first SATA port, and so on.

The other thing that you can do is to go to Storage Management and simply reassigned all the drive letters.
 
G

Guest

Guest
All sounds good. One note though - XP won't let you reassign the system (boot) drive letter. The easiest way to ensure this ends up as 'C:' is to install with only one hdd on the primary SATA port and one DVD drive plugged in somewhere else.

Stuart
 

Sam

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Ok folks, Michiganteddybear got the grand prize. I did unplug the USB card reader and reinstalled. This time all drive letters were installed correctly in the conventional way. Problem solved.

Thanks to all for the help.

...>>Sam