Windows 7 how do i change default hdd?

[asuindasun]

I have my 500gig harddrive partitioned to a 50g (e drive) and 450g (h drive) with windows 7 on the e drive partition. I think there was a way to change the default partition in vista from the "c" drive to another one, was wondering if that's possible with windows 7. Instead of everything i download and every program i install going to the e drive, is there a way to set the h drive as the default drive?

Thanks.

(W7 ROCKS)

 

[SIW2]

Hi,

The program installer will usually give the option to set the install location .

Your browser/download manager will have a setting to change the location it saves downloads to.

 

[reghakr]

Hello asuindasun,

What is on you C: drive now?

Go to Start > Run, and type diskmgmt.msc, maximize the window and hit Alt + PrtScrn.

Now attach that back here with your followup post so we can see how your partitioning scheme is setup

 

[asuindasun]

hdd patitions

Sorry if it's too big.

But the C drive is what i have vista and all its programs loaded on. New volume E: and H: are the windows 7 side. The E drive has the OS on it along with a couple other programs that i need to move. H drive has everything else.

 

[reghakr]

Are they SATA or IDE drives?

Your boot partition is Windows 7, so you can't just change jumpers if you have IDE drives.

On initial setup of the drives, you should have made C: the Boot, System, Pagefile ,Crash dump

BTW, where is drive letter D:?

 

[SIW2]

Hi reghakr,

I think you'll find D is the optical drive.

E is showing as "Boot" because that is the partition containing the o/s files he was "Boot"ed into at the time he took the screenshot .

When he boots into the o/s installed on C, then C will show as the Boot partition.

C shows as the "System" partition because it is the partition thru. which the operating "System" is booted.

The reason C is the System partition is because it was the first Active partition the installer saw ( in this case , it happens to be the only active partition ).

Windows installer will place the boot files on the active partition - therefore it is called ( oddly) the "System " partition.



Unless I misunderstood the OP - he only has a small(ish) 50gb partition for 7.

What he seems to want is for all his downloads and installed programs to go onto the larger H partition.

Hope it helps.

 

[reghakr]

OK,

understand about the D: drive.

My question is why is Disk 0 not set as the C: drive, or did you switch letter around on your own.

Was this second hard drive put in by you or from the factory?

 

[asuindasun]

It just did it like that. The whole computer is built be me. May be because I have the C drive in the second SATA port and the other one in the first SATA. So basically what I'm getting so far is that I'll have to reformat and change the boot and system drive to be solely on the E drive? Also, if I did change that, would windows updates go to the correct partition?

Basically what I'm looking for is optimizing my computer's speed, have everything except the hard drives pushed about as far as I feel necessary, but I know having a partition for windows separate from all the other files (music, programs, exc) speeds things up a bit. ALSO, may soon be getting a solid state harddrive, but just one big enough to install windows on, so would need to switch the drives then as well.

 

[reghakr]

May be because I have the C drive in the second SATA port and the other one in the first SATA

yes, that's the point I was trying to make.

I can tell you how I usually set up my partitioning scheme.

I allocate about 40GB for Windows 7, split the rest of the unallocated space into two, and the D: drive is where I install all my third-party software to, the E: drive is where I store documents, music, pictures, videos, zip files, etc

There are many speed improvements, it would take pages to compose. Basically prevent anything from running on startup except for your anti-virus, spyware detector, and personal firewall (if you have one).

You can tweak services by setting many to manual rather than Automatic Startup and you can disable quite a few also.

You can Add/Remove Windows components by going to Start > Run, and type optional features.exe.

many more, that's just off the top off my head.