Drive letter weirdness on a new PC

Factual Questions
1

I’ve been building a new computer from components, and I thought I was done but now I have this odd problem. I bought a new hard drive and set it to master, set my old hard drive to slave, and made sure to put them on the proper place on the ATA cable. I used the software supplied with the new disk (Maxtor) to partition it, then the XP Pro setup disk detected drive 0 as a blank disk, so I formatted it then installed Windows. Once the installation was finished, I noticed that my old drive was C:, new drive (where XP Pro was installed) was F:, CD drives were D: and E:. I verified in the Disk Manager that F: is drive 0 and C: is drive 1, so what I want to know is why isn’t drive 0 C: and drive 1 D:? I know how to change the drive letters but that could introduce new problems.

2

Drive 0 is NTFS and drive 1 is FAT32, and the CD drives are on a separate ATA cable.

3

I had the same problem. Apparently Windoze found the OS on the old disk and assigned it as the C: drive. What I did was to disconnect the old drive, reinstall Windoze, then hook the drive cables back up. It then recognized the old drive as F: (D: and E: are my DVD-ROM and CD-RW).

4

If my old drive had an OS I would think that, but it just has data. I have a 3rd drive with Win 98 that I’m not going to use because it’s only 20 GB. I guess I could reinstall using your method, but is there some other solution?

5

I’m guessing that the windows install started, detected the three disks and assigned them drive letters then used the next free drive letter as the next disk.

That way it didn’t stuff up your drive lettering (because things on what it saw as C: may rely on being C: ).

The way round this would be to format the disk first (before the windows setup has started) then install windows. You may get away with abandoning the setup after the format and then restarting it, but it’s probably recorded the ‘correct’ drive letters by then.

I should mention that I’ve never seen this myself but I suspect that’s what is happening. It looks like it’s XP trying to be clever and not stuff up your system.

SD