Need to Change Drive Letter of Partition with W7-64 Ultimate Installed

[ihameed46]

I have just completed a fresh windows 7 install and just after I have loaded all programmes and 215 Windows updates I am being told by HP that to load my HP printer drivers the windows installation needs to be on a partition with a drive letter C.

Now I know most installs are on C drive and that Windows normally changes active drive to C when loading but for some reason when I was installing, because the C drive letter was being used by the then active Windows partition the installer had to give my new install a new drive letter that could not be C.

Now that I have removed my previous Windows installation the drive letter C is free but Disk Management app (in Windows) warns that I may corrupt my installation if I change the bootable drive letter. Is that because the motherboard drivers will be looking for a different drive letter if I go and change letters now?

I ask the community - any answers to my question on how to safely change boot partition drive letter. The new install is on an SSD drive so the BIOS is set to ahci (if that is helpful).

 

[herrwizo]

Wait a sec, are you telling that when you boot from an ssd, you see your system partition as d drive letter? Without c?

 

[ihameed46]

Yes that is correct. Not D but G. I had two other drives that had various partitions that took the other letters between C and G. So the SSD got G.

 

[herrwizo]

I never thought that is possible, strange. Still, the way i see it, you cant change it since you will mess up the entire registry being linked to g, so it likely wont even boot to desktop. The only solution to me seems a full reinstall of windows.

 

[bambiboom]

ihameed46,

This happened to me when I added an SSD to a new system, also Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. Since the system arrived with a mech'l drive and I made my usual partitions, when I tried to migrate the C: drive to the SSD, it called it F: and I couldn't see how to manually change it because all the registry entries would be wrong. As your system is using Win 7 Ultimate also, I wonder if Ultimate may be given a non-C: drive as primary / boot drive as part of some server capability- or- who knows?

As I didn't have any programs or files loaded, I decided to use the mech'l drive to be a workhorse and set up C: and then migrate to the SSD. Besides guaranteeing the primary drive would be C:, this has another great advantage. Because SSD's shouldn't defragged as it wears the memory prematurely, I could set up on the Mech'l drive and load, refine everything, and use a disk optimizer to place file and consolidate.

I began by setting a partition on the Seagate 500GB of 235GB- a few GB smaller than the Samsung 840 250GB SSD. This meant that the C: drive would not be larger than the SSD and I'd have a small partition-10GB that I use for working files. As I added a 1TB drive to the system, the original 500GB Seagate went into a StarTech SATA III Aluminum enclosure (with switchable fan) and I have my backup drive with the original OS system restore partition on it.

This worked our really well, the drive letter was correct, I knew the SSD was optimized without adding wear, and the performance of the system on Passmark Performance Test was very good for it's specification. By the way, I recommend Passmark highly to evaluate changes to the system as it's setup. They have a free 30-day trial but I'd buy it- very useful. I found for example, that the graphics score improved more than 25% by using the (ugly) Basic Theme desktop instead of Aero. The animated menus and transparency are terrible performance thieves. Passmark is also very useful to look up the performance of components. You can see right away the way systems with the same CPU and motherboard differ when only the GPU changes. I buy all my important components by searching the baselines.

Let us know what happens.

Cheers,

BambiBoom

HP z420 (2014) > Xeon E5-1620 quad core @ 3.6 / 3.8GHz > 24GB ECC 1600 RAM > Quadro 4000 (2GB)> Samsung 840 SSD 250GB /Western Digital Black WD1003FZEX 1TB> M-Audio 192 sound card > AE3000 USB WiFi > HP 2711X, 27" 1920 X 1080 > Windows 7 Ultimate 64 >[Passmark system rating = 3923, 2D= 839 / 3D=2048]

Dell Precision T5400 (2008) > 2X Xeon X5460 quad core @3.16GHz > 16GB ECC 667> Quadro FX 4800 (1.5GB) > WD RE4 500GB / Seagate Barracuda 500GB > M-Audio 2496 Sound Card / Linksys 600N WiFi > Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit >[Passmark system rating = 1859, 2D= 512 / 3D=1097]

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