Windows Drive Letter Madness

In the first week of December I once again upgraded my parents' PC's. One of the steps in this upgrade involves installing windows 2000 in a dual boot setup on my fathers' PC. I also installed a new bigger harddrive at the time, so to save time and ease data migration I left the old drive in the system while setting up the new one.

Now the windows installation program noticed the old installation on the second hard drive and decided I could not use C:, and instead assigned me F:. I figured it shouldn't matter, and besides, surely it can be changed.

Then of course he tried to install the software for his Garmin GPS, which promptly failed with an error message complaining that C is an invalid drive.

After spending several hours on this I now know that you cannot change the drive letter at installation time and definitely not afterwards. You have to unplug the disks you are not using at the time and reinstall.

I finally found a solution using the subst command. It allows you to map any physical drive and path to a virtual drive, so this would do the job:

subst c: f:\

I finally contrived this little hack:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run]
"subst"="c:\\winnt\\system32\\subst.exe c: f:\\"

Lets hope that's the end of it.