Windows 7 7 and XP are both C:

[shantelle]

Hello,

September last year I purchased a pc magazine with Windows 7 RC on it. I dual booted with XP & everything worked fine. When I started up XP, My Computer stated that XP was on C:, my DVD Drive was D: & Windows 7 was E:. When I started up Windows 7, My Computer stated that Windows 7 was E:, my DVD Drive was D: & XP was on C:.

2 weeks ago I purchased Windows 7 & have again dual booted with XP. When I start up XP everything remains as previously stated but now when I start up Windows 7, My Computer states that Windows 7 is C:, my DVD Drive is D: & XP is E:. When I restart XP, it is read as C: again.

My pc is running fine & installing programs without issue, but I was just wondering if the drive letters are supposed to change as they are and am I likely to run into any problems if I leave things the way they are?

Thanks,

Shantelle.

 

[drmario]

It shouldn't be a problem. I was dual-booting Vista and Windows 7 RC, and whichever the C drive belonged to whichever OS was booted at the time. It didn't cause me any problems. If you don't want to get them mixed up though, you can name the drives. Just right click on it in explorer and rename it. So if you call the drive with XP on it "XP", when you boot into XP, it'll be XP (C: ), and when you boot into 7 it'll be XP(D: ), or whatever letter it decides to use.

 

[RAK]

It is the normal default letter assignation, It began with Vista. In fact, drmario's advice is the solution and was reccomended by Microsoft themselves during the Vista beta testing phase. IOt was their suggestion that letter designators are no longer important, and partitions/hard disks, should be named instead. I, at first, took an old fashioned view and did not see the point. I now, only use names and, looking back, can see the logic.

 

[fjgold]

Drive letters are assigned by the OS that is running.
If Win 7 is ruuning and it isn't some kind of strange setup then C:\ shood be the Win 7 drive.
The same applies to XP.

Your present setup is the norm, what you had with the RC dualboot was not.

BTW, you can't change your C:\ drive letter from Windows.
All other drive letters are fair game with the exception that you can't have duplicate drive letters.
For simplicity's sake, regardless of OS running, my current OS is C:\ and the other (not running) OS is J:\ plus a large NTFS partition
that I use for program installs and My Documents etc I designate this partition U:\ in both OS's

 

[shantelle]

Thank you to everyone who responded.