Windows XP Pro and drive naming

[sorcerer]

I think I already know the answer to this but I promised I would ask the hive mind so here I am, doing my bit.

A friend has some software that will only run on XP and nothing more up to date. He recently had a problem which resulted in him using the manufacturer's recovery disc (Mesh Computers) and all seemed to go well except that it somehow transposed the partitions.

He has a 1TB drive, partitioned into two 500GBs, C: and D:, with the boot drive obviously being C:, but the recovery disc has now somehow installed Windows on D and it appears to be causing problems when reinstalling programs.

Can the drive letters simply be swapped so that the current Windows installation becomes C again like it should be? I have a feeling not, but I wasn't even interested in computers when XP was around so I have no idea how XP handles such things.

 

[HFultzjr]

I could be wrong, but I don't think it will be that easy.
I would:
Wipe the drive (make sure he has copied the data he needs)
Install XP on the drive
THEN create partition D

 

[sorcerer]

Thanks Harold, that's what I suspected although if anyone knows different, I'd be happy to hear.

 

[Diggs]

Clone the drive and try it.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Windows XP just like Windows 10 letters drives via the registry.

Now... BACKUP the blasted system first, then just do this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...store-the-system-boot-drive-letter-in-windows

 

[sorcerer]

Thanks guys but he lives over 150 miles away, which is why he didn't ask me to do the job in the first place. He doesn't have the tools or faciliries to clone the drive.

Sky-Knight, I'll have a look at that link now, thanks.

 

[HFultzjr]

Hmmmm.
Interesting link provided.
Please let us know if it works.

 

[sorcerer]

He's going to tackle it this weekend so I will indeed Harold.

 

[sorcerer]

Just to put this to bed, my mate tried the instructions in the link given by Sky Knight above but, although the drive letters were renamed easily enough, it threw up all sorts of problems with various DLLs missing and programs not installing or running correctly so he flattened the lot and started afresh.

Thanks for the help though guys.

 

[HFultzjr]

Thanks for getting back to us.

 

[Sky-Knight]

I've only done this once, but yes the registry is full of hard coded paths... so you wind up doing a huge find / replace in there to clean up the junk.

It really is easier to reinstall, BUT I never forgot about this little hack because some of those old systems wouldn't put the C drive as C without it. Usually systems with multi-card readers.