Hard Drive Questions...

Hello,

I have a few questions about my hard drive that I hope some of you out there can help me with.

Fist, when my friend first set up my computer, for some reason, the hard drive with the system files on it was designated as G and the smaller hard drive was designated as H. I think I noticed this and asked him about it and he said it would be fine.

I didn't have any problems for a while but then, when I tried to install some older programs for school, they would not let me install them. I soon discovered that, for some reason, they needed a drive designated as "C" in order to install. I tried to chang the G drive to a C though the Administrative tools but it would not let me. I was able to change the H drive though and this allowed me to install the drive. I talked to my friend about it and he said that he forgot that XP/XP Programs can be funny about that and that he uses Linux, which doesn't seem to have a problem with it, so it slipped his mind.

That said, here's the question: Is there a way that I can assign a new letter to my system/boot drive - in this case G:?

Also, I was hoping to upgrade my mobo with some uber cheap model off of E-bay. Two questions. First, can I just swap out a motherboard while keeping all the other components the same (even the CPU) and not have any problems? If so, could anyone tell me what the best slot-1 motherboard would have been (before they stopped making them)?

Thanks

My Specs:
Orignially A Dell Dimension XPS T850r
Operating System Microsoft Windows XP Professional
OS Service Pack Service Pack 2
DirectX 4.09.00.0904 (DirectX 9.0c)
CPU Type Intel Celeron-S, 1400 MHz (slot 1 adapter)
Motherboard Name Intel Seattle II SE440BX-2
(2 ISA, 4 PCI, 1 AGP, 3 DIMM)
Motherboard Chipset Intel 82440BX
System Memory 768 MB (SDRAM100)
Video Adapter NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 (128 MB) Audio Adapter Creative SB Live! Value Sound Card
Disk Drive C: QUANTUM FIREBALLP LM SCSI Disk
(30 GB)
Disk Drive G: WDC WD16 00JB-00GVA0 SCSI Disk
(127 GB)
Disk Drive D: IOMEGA ZIP 250 (27 GB, IDE)
Disk Drive E: NEC DVD_RW ND-3550A
Disk Drive F: (Ricoh) CD-R/RW RW7200A
Network Adapter D-Link DGE-530T Gigabit Ethernet

 

Sadly, the answer is no.
You're whole Master Boot Record and Master File Table (the "roots" of your harddrive) are based on the primary drive/partition letter. You should backup all data and reinstall windows, it's for the best if you want windows to be compatible with older software

 

Not without getting a new power supply. Dells (at least of that older model) use a proprietary wiring scheme for the motherboard power.

 

You may also want to consider to purchase new memory as Dell PC's use their own manufactured (or Kingston) memory. But there is only 1 way to find out if your current dell memory is compatible with the über cheap one and that's by simply try it out

 

Thanks for the advice.

I was afraid of both answers.

Darn Dell and their proprietary parts. I suppose I shall refrain from upgrading for a while.

Argh.

 

If you end up formatting & starting again take a look [http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326683/] at Microsoft[/url].