Via Microsoft’s help page:

* Changing the drive letter of the system volume or the boot volume is not a built-in feature of the Disk Management snap-in.

* Many MS-DOS-based and Microsoft Windows-based programs refer to specific drive letters for environmental or other variables. If you modify the drive letter, these programs may not function correctly.

With this in mind, why in the world would Microsoft ever, ever have Windows assign the boot drive as anything other than C:? Seriously, because now Windows is installed on the G: drive and I have a lingering suspicion that a lot of applications are not going to like the C: being a removable disk drive for SD cards. How hard is it to make sure that Windows, when there is no other OS installed, always has the drive it is installed on as the C: drive?

In any event, a valuable lesson learned. Historically, I disconnect all other drives when I am reinstalling Windows. But I couldn’t remember why I was doing it other than the vague fear of a drive getting formatted over. Well, now I know why I am going to need to do this in the future, I guess. I wonder if this is one of the reasons why I did this before.


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3 Responses to Thanks, Microsoft

  1. web says:

    Actually, this used to be a really major bug back in the Win2k and early XP days. The system would install to a drive, but assign an internal Zip drive to letter C, but many programs just assumed that C:\Program Files was where everything would go.

    We actually had a machine with a Zip disk taped inside the drive and a sign over it saying “DO NOT REMOVE ZIP DISK” because of a piece of proprietary software that wouldn’t work from anywhere else.

  2. trumwill says:

    Why? Why? Why? It just makes no sense. Programatically, I would think that making sure that the C-Drive is the boot drive would have been easy to do.

  3. Kirk says:

    For what it’s worth, I have no idea what you f*cking geeks are talking about. I mean, what the f*ck is an SD card?

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