C: As the XP Recovery Partition
 

I just took my new Netbook out of its carton and got it working. I was very surprised that the recovery partition for XP is C: and the user's partition is D:. I wonder how much havoc this will cause. I'm going to have to modify some software I wrote to accommodate this situation. I should have done this long ago to allow it to operate in any partition.

Can you not simply rename the partitions?

I don't know enough to be willing to rename partitions on a brand-new computer. That sounds pretty major to me. There must be something somewhere which expects the recovery partition to be named C:.

When turned on for the first time, the machine did what I assume was a full recovery.

It's a mystery to me. Google has not yet been my friend in this matter.

seacue

Sounds like a rather stupid way of doing things. The vendor should hang their head in shame. Recovery partitions, often of questionable use, are usually hidden. Changing the drive letter on the system volume is not a trivial task.

Perhaps now would be a good time to improve your software and use environment variables instead of coding static paths into it? Static paths = bad.

Changing drive path letters is simple in xp. Right click computer, click manage, click disk management & from there, right click the drive & choose change drive letter & path & it does it. Drive letters are nominal, you can give them any letter you like.

Shunter,

I think that I've found all the places that need changing in one of my programs. Not too big a deal.

Now to teach the WiFi in the Netbook to work.

seacue

Seacue, why come here to ask a question & then ignore the answer? It makes one feel...undervalued.:)

How to change drive letter assignments in Windows XP

Thank you for your info Spogget. It certainly tells me how to change the Drive/Partition letters. I will consult it when I get to that point.

I now realize that I am fundamentally too timid to meddle with drive letters so soon after buying the little box. I'll run it for a while to see what breaks before breaking things myself.

Wireless now working fine.

Sprogget, you cannot simply just change the system drive letter I'm afraid.

A usb drive? Sure. The system drive, no. The article you reference refers to non-critical drives. As you can see from this article, it's a little more involved when it's the system drive and is very likely to result in a 1-way ticket to blue-screen central:
Change System Drive Letter in Windows XP

The whole concept of drive letters is actually ridiculous and a flaw almost exclusive to Microsoft. Proper operating systems are not bound by this idiocy.

Really?

Operating systems that use drive letter assignment



* Digital Research CP/M, MP/M, Concurrent DOS, DOS Plus and DR-DOS
* 86-DOS
* IBM PC-DOS and Microsoft MS-DOS
* MSX-DOS
* Elektronika BK operating systems: ANDOS, CSI-DOS, MK-DOS
* PTS-DOS
* Atari TOS
* SpartaDOS X
* GEOS
* SymbOS
* OS/2 / eComStation
* Microsoft Windows
* Microsoft Xbox video game console operating system
* FreeDOS
* ReactOS
* Symbian OS
* DexOS
* Miraculix

Oh yes you can...

How to restore the system/boot drive letter in Windows

Sprogget, Shunter,

It's quite amusing that you both point to the same text (albeit in different articles) to support opposite views!

Lets us simply leave it as technically possible but highly inadvisable to change the system / boot drive letter in Windows.

SD

Anyone who writes software which contains hard coded disk locations should not only modify their software but should also modify the way they write software.

Thank you DX, for the inspirational thoughts. One has to start somewhere and this s/w was written over a decade ago.

It's a good point, well made & taken!

Kind regards from s, g & r drives!!:)