Changing the the drive letter that has the OS on it?

When I built this computer, I wasn't pay attention and now the system drive is F. The C drive is floppy drive or something. Is there a way to change the system drive from F to C without causing havoc and having to reformat?

 

I just tried to do this, and I got the warning below:

Seems like Windows can't do this natively for your system volume. You might be able to try a third-party application. (google partition magic, for example) Honestly though, even if you could, you might be asking for loads of trouble. (programs looking at the wrong location, registry keys, environment variables) You're probably better off formatting. Because your system is still working, this doesn't have to be painful! You can easily back up your personal files beforehand!

 

you can't do that without breaking a few laws of the universe.

 

>> When I built this computer, I wasn't pay attention and now the system drive is F. The C drive is floppy drive or something. Is there a way to change the system drive from F to C without causing havoc and having to reformat? << nmfire10

Warning:
Do NOT attempt to move the system drive from where it was originally installed to any other drive.

The Bad News: Simply put, you cannot change the system or boot drive letter assignments (in other words, wherever you initially installed the Windows OS drive). It's simply not possible. You would have to do a "clean" installation if you cannot live with wherever it currently resides. It's the only way, I'm afraid.

The Good News: For all intents and purposes, it would be OK to leave it on the F Drive. The only problems that you will likely run into is that many programs will use a "default install" directory on C, or have standard paths on C, and some will even only install on C. It all depends upon how the programs was designed by the developer and what configurations the program allows users to make.

Since I got curious about this; after reading your post today, I researched this topic via Google using the search phrase: changing drive letter "F to C" and the search phrase: "change boot drive letter assignments" Every single relevant search result warned users NOT to do this and that if tried it would bring disastrous results.

The only thing I found that was even remotely close to what you want to do was that in certain cases [but not always] if you're using Win 2000/ Win XP/Win Server 2003 operating system; you might be able to restore the system or boot drive letter - to a previous state - when the drive letters suddenly are changed without any user intervention, i.e. when you break a mirror volume or there is a drive configuration change.

Unfortunately, the method explained there does not apply in your case.

 

The only reason i want to change it is because of software that only works on C. I guess I'll have to format it... on a rainy day.