Hi, I put in a new hard drive- in addition to the main one already inside- and installed Windows on it. Then when taking out the original hard drive, there were problems booting from the second one, but it now works fine. The question here is like this: it seems that originally something named this drive as D:, being that there already was a C:. But now that there is no longer a C:, is there a way to tell it 'you're the only one around- why not become C:?' Thanks, Larry

EEEEPPPSSS!! You should not have booted into the second hard drive's OS with the first one's OS also installed. It can cause other problems besides the ones you encountered. You will have to re-install. Rule #1 Good computers don't go down. Rule #2 There is no such thing as a good computer.

No. Since you installed windows on it when it was "D" that is now the "System" drive letter. You cannot change the designation of a "System"drive. Your only choice would be to format and reinstal windows, or live with it being a D drive. I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

What I did was 'repair install' Windows so that it works, and 'fixboot' and 'fixmbr'. Though it was still not loading. Then after resetting the BIOS, (Dell computer- in the config menu: caps on, scroll on, numlock on, then alt f, alt e, alt b.) it is ok. But this has nothing to do with the drive letter- it stayed at D:... (Though when istalling Windows with 'repair install' it came up as C:... I dont really get that...) Thanks, Larry (In short- no real solution without reformatting??)

Perhaps this explaination will help. When you installed xP to d: its boot files were on c:. You have 1000's of registry entries saying everything is on d: In MS speak [since they reversed themselves from dos days] system is where the boot files are [c: ] and boot is where the windows folder is [d:] When you removed the drive and ran fixboot/mbr you corrected boot pointers AND some registry entries. But not all. you can correct this with a repair install of XP but I have seen registry entries after a repair that still are invalid. This is what I call registry bloat and is a major flaw in Ms design imho.

Does that mean that if after a 'repair install' it is still called 'D:', there is nothing that could really be done? Thanks, Larry