re: Changing Drive Letter in XP Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 9:30 am Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum Posted by Pietro M. Picca (2 messages posted) Hi! I write my comment with a few years of delay, but I hope that this could help at least someone else. I was experiencing the same problem. I have two DVD-ROM drives on my computer, named V: and W:, and two hard drives, C: and D:. The OS is Windows XP with (now) SP3, but the problem was existing even with SP2. Sometimes, due to some weird reasons, after a reboot, DVD-ROM drives were changing their letters to E: and F:, the two smallest available letters. No matter if I changed manually to V: and W: through Disk Management. This setting was kept for the duration of the current session. At the following reboot, they were reverted to E: and F:. After checking this issue on several forums, I understood that the last configuration I was trying to store in the registry, for some reasons, was marked as not valid and hence not kept, so Windows XP at the following reboot was reloading the last known working configuration. Well, the problem was identified, yet far from being solved. After two or three months, I found out the solution by modifying the registry in the following way, without using Disk Management tool among the administrative tools in the Control Panel. The situation in the undesired configuration is shown under the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\DOS Devices I was finding: \\DosDevices\C: pointing to the first hard drive \\DosDevices\D: pointing to the second hard drive \\DosDevices\E: pointing to the first DVD drive \\DosDevices\F: pointing to the second DVD drive These two last ones, instead of V: and W:. My workaround is the following: 1. rename \\DosDevices\E: into \\DosDevices\V: 2. rename \\DosDevices\F: into \\DosDevices\W: 3. create a new key \\DosDevices\E: as REG_BINARY 4. copy the content of \\DosDevices\D: into the newly created \\DosDevices\E: These two last passages prevents Windows from re-assigning DVD letters at the following reboot in a wrong way, but anyway during the bootstrap Windows finds that the second physical hard drive is pointed both by D: and E: and automatically deletes E: (the higher one). So, at the following reboot I managed to save the configuration that I wanted. No explanation by the way about the cause of this malfunctioning. Cheers, Pietro M. Picca Written in response to: re: Changing Drive Letter in XP (Dan: Friday, March 14, 2008 at 10:15 am) There are presently no replies to this message. All messages in this thread [show all] Changeing Drive Letter in XP (C. Richard Matthews: Sun, Jul 6, 2003, 3:10 pm) re: Changing Drive Letter in XP (Steve: Sun, Jul 6, 2003, 3:23 pm) re: Changing Drive Letter in XP (C. Richard Matthews: Sun, Jul 6, 2003, 4:46 pm) re: Changing Drive Letter in XP (Steve: Sun, Jul 6, 2003, 7:57 pm) re: Changing Drive Letter in XP (AlienTech: Fri, Sep 26, 2003, 3:34 pm) re: Changeing Drive Letter in XP (Ricer46: Sun, Jul 6, 2003, 3:29 pm) re: Changeing Drive Letter in XP (Oscar: Sun, Jul 6, 2003, 3:40 pm) re: Changeing Drive Letter in XP (Magician: Mon, Jul 7, 2003, 3:10 pm) re: Changeing Drive Letter in XP (C. Richard Matthews: Wed, Jul 9, 2003, 1:01 pm) re: Changeing Drive Letter in XP (Carlos Cavenago: Mon, Jun 13, 2005, 3:49 pm) re: Changeing Drive Letter in XP (Bob: Tue, Aug 23, 2005, 12:01 pm) re: Changeing Drive Letter in XP (Robert Walker: Tue, Aug 30, 2005, 2:11 pm) re: Changeing Drive Letter in XP (Chase: Wed, Nov 26, 2003, 6:42 pm) re: Changeing Drive Letter in XP (David K: Wed, Jan 28, 2004, 4:02 am) re: Changeing Drive Letter in XP (dirtyangus: Wed, May 26, 2004, 1:54 am) re: Changeing Drive Letter in XP (Tim: Sun, May 30, 2004, 12:29 pm) re: Changeing Drive Letter in XP (Craig Keegan: Sun, Jun 20, 2004, 5:20 pm) re: Changeing Drive Letter in XP (Dennis Pearson: Sat, Jul 3, 2004, 1:15 pm) re: Changeing Drive Letter in XP (Wagner: Thu, Jun 9, 2005, 12:06 pm) re: Changeing Drive Letter in XP (Steve Bisel: Thu, Aug 24, 2006, 3:13 pm) re: Changing Drive Letter in XP (Paul: Mon, Jan 29, 2007, 6:09 pm) re: Changing Drive Letter in XP (Chris2var: Wed, Feb 21, 2007, 12:27 pm) re: Changing Drive Letter in XP (Chris2var: Thu, Feb 22, 2007, 1:33 am) re: Changing Drive Letter in XP (Dan: Fri, Mar 14, 2008, 10:15 am) re: Changing Drive Letter in XP (Pietro M. Picca: Wed, Aug 19, 2009, 9:30 am) Reply or follow-up to this message Search this forum Start a new thread on a different subject Report abuse of the forum Return to the Windows XP Discussion Forum