Reaasign my primary drive letter

Is it safe to use regedit to reaasign my primary drive letter? I bought a new drive as the other one was a little suspect. Installed Hitachi 80gb as main cable select, partitioned it into 2x40 and reinstalled XP. I used the western digital 40gb as a slave with jumpers set to slave.
My primary drive is now allocated F the slave is C. I can change the slave using drive management but need to use HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices to allocate F back to C. The main reason is quite a bit of software will only install on C which is usually the primary.
Will this screw everything up because it has all the windows files with the address F:\whatever if I do this?

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i would use Maxtor blast 4
( http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Ma...&downloadID=58 ) as jephree sugested for me to use a while back (this was for something else, but i remember seeing the function to change drive letters)

however, i'm not sure about the regedit, someone else could probably tell you that

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Useful guides for modding your computer

Was the Western Digital the suspect drive? With the previous XP?

First off I would recommend if you are using the Cable Select jumper on one drive you should use it on both.

Next from my reading I am seeing that the notion of C: being the System Drive under NTFS is moot.

That being said I see that running a Repair Install is probably the easiest/safest way to change this.

I would recommend removing the old/slave drive during the reinstall (espescially if it has XP on it).

Also from what I read in regards to your specific question: editing the registry here is very questionable unless you are restoring your system to a previous state.

This is what I have been reading:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...;EN-US;q223188

http://groups.google.com/group/micro...50d290722925a0

http://groups.google.com/group/micro...r+of+os&qt_g=1

Hope this helps.

So you suggest leaving it as is for now Jephree?

The western digital is the suspect one, it lost the boot sector and I had to use the recovery cd. There were a lot of remnants left on it that I couldnt see and instead of wiping the drive like the recovery cd said it would it installed over the top and renamed all the users to old like all users.windows. I thought it safer to buy a new drive and start from scratch.

The Hitachi drive which I did the fresh install on is called local disk F so you're saying it doesnt have to be C? Its only some programs that insist on installing their base stuff on C. While this isnt a problem, if that drive goes belly up eventually, I'll have to reinstall heaps of programs.

I think I will do a reinstall again, they say 3rd time lucky. I just thought it strange that it would call the old drive C. I've installed on heaps of computers with slaves and this a first. With the slave disconnected, the drive boots up fine so I'll plan a reinstall one day just for the programs sake.

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As far as I know (which isn't too far) the letters are set automatically during the install.

If there was a C: already present (on any drive) then a different letter would be assigned.

As madmikejt12 points out Maxtor has a cloning program for its' drives but I don't see any such thing for Hitachi. Of course there are third party programs to clone/ghost the drive. You would copy over all the XP errors as well but could then repair XP afterwards.
The advantage there of copying over all your programs.

Otherwise I think you are OK as is.

My guess is that if you reinstall/repair XP on the new drive with the old drive removed then XP will be C:
Then on reinstalling the old drive that old C: will change to F:

LOL Thanks Jephree, as I read on the google groups it said 'learn to love the letters Windows assigns.

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