During the installation of WinXP on a new computer, drive letter C was assigned to my zip drive and drive letter F to the hard drive. By following instructions in the help file, I have now re-assigned the zip drive to drive letter G, but the help file gives no info on how to change the boot drive, just says it can't be done in disk management. Many of my software programs refuse to run unless the hard drive is labeled as C. Can anyone help?

Try this http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q307844

HOW TO: Change the System/Boot Drive Letter in Windows This article is for Windows 2000, but the same concepts apply to Windows XP. Some user's have reported that this has rendered their system unbootable. Others say it worked.

*** FORMAT THE DRIVE AND REINSTALL *** It's not worth trying to fix it. TRUST ME! I had the exact same problem and spent hours trying to straighten everything out. Windows XP setup has a very hard time deciding what drive letter to use when installing. Why they don't let you choose the install location manually is beyond me (you can with an unattended install). Unplug every SCSI and IDE drive (CD/RW/DVD, ZIP, TAPE) and leave just the drive to install to, the floppy, and the CD drive with the XP disk. Now reinstall. You should get a good install with windows in C:\Windows like it should be. Now reconnect all your devices and change the drive letter like you did before with the Zip drive. Check this article. I've actually had this happen too. It took me a while to figure out why Setup said there wasn't enough space available when I had an empty 120GB drive just sitting there. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;304776

With the computer turned off, unplug the power plugs on all drives except the drive that has xp on it and the a drive (all other hard disks, CD drives, and the zip drive). Power up the computer. I think it will boot and the xp drive will be c. Power down and plug in all the other drive power plugs. When you boot up, the xp drive should still be c. Use disk management to assign the other letters as desired. I think this will work.

If XP already been installed, then that solution won't work. When XP Setup runs, it writes info to the master boot record (MBR) telling the partition what drive letter it is. Just unplugging the other equipment won't do the trick. There are tools that let you change the MBR (Partion Magic is one). You can change the boot drive letter in the registry. However I guarentee it'll be easier just to reinstall XP. Sorry.

Before you do Response Number 4, make sure that the xp drive is master and the other drive on the cable is slave.