drive letter assignment question

I recently replaced HD on my old P4 box and performed a baremetal install of WinXPH. Win assigned J to the drive. Later, using Disk Director I stupidly went in and changed the J to C (C had been assigned to another partition on my slave drive). Of course on reboot I guess Win was looking for J and would not boot passed the light blue screen with the Win logo. Am I correct in the assumption that I must format and re install Win? Booting with the DD disk shows that in fact the system drive is now C, but will not allow a change.

 

The best way would probably be to do a reinstall. It is quite hard to change the Windows primary drive letter after an installation.

When installing, make sure that you only have the WinXP drive connected or have created the partition BEFORE installing Windows so the Windows installation sees it first. If there was no partition on the drive then the installation will assign a drive letter after all existing drives. This includes any media reader drives, so make sure this is unplugged too.

What I've done several times is to boot from the XP cd and follow through with the installation until it gets to the "where do you want to install" part. I create the partition and then abort the installation. Then I boot again and this time the partition is found first and it's set to go.

Immediately after booting into Windows, check the drive assignment and make sure it's C. If it's not, then see what drive is assigned prior, disconnect or otherwise fix the problem and then reinstall.

 

Thanks
I formatted and re installed (needed to clean out anyway)

sl2