I have 2 hard drives in my computer and decided do my yearly formatting of my C:\ drive and do a fresh install of Win XP Pro ( I was using 2000 Pro). I ran fdisk on the C: drive and left the D: alone because I use D: as my storage drive and have no need to reformat it. My problem starts after booting to the XP CD and it finds both drives but because I didn’t do fdisk on my D: drive it now shows my D: as my C: and the XP installation will now boot from the D: drive that was once my C: (whew, that went over my head also). To sum it up, my bootable drive has now become my D: drive and my storage is my C:. I’ve tried changing this under the administrative tools but it won’t allow you to change the drive letter of the boot drive. The only way I could fix it was to disconnect my D: (original Storage Drive) and reinstall with only 1 drive connected to my computer; then I would reconnect the D: drive after XP was installed and it would assign it a letter other than C:. I know XP can boot from any drive letter associated to a hard drive but I like my C: to be the boot. Is there any other way to prevent the drive letters from swapping during an XP install? Hope I didn’t confuse any one…lol Thanks for your time. David D.

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David, after you used fdisk to wipe the C: drive, your D: drive was the only recognizable partition left, so it automatically became your C: drive. If you use a bootdisk to create a new primary DOS partition, then format it, your PC will recognize it as the C: partition when you reboot (assuming that it is jumpered as primary master). Then put the XP CD in the drive & boot from the CD. XP will then install to C: the way that you want it to. Early in the installation, you can have XP setup reformat as NTFS if you want, but the drive letters will remain the same. HTH Dave