SOLVED Boot Partition Keeps Taking Drive letter "C"

[Dumbledazz]

Every time I boot up windows, it automatically takes C:/. Even though I had previously changed it. I also manually changed it in CMD before boot via installation USB.

I recently switched my hard drive, and on my previous one, all my files and everything was on C:/ including windows (I didn't do that or know until recently, but oh well). When transferring everything Win wouldn't boot, thus how I found out. So I made a separate Win partition, but now every time I load windows it automatically takes C:/ even though I'd manually switched letters more than once, and made my data partition C:/ so it changes data partition to D:/ and Win Boot partition to C:/ every time it loads.

How do I stop it from doing this? As everything I've downloaded has the wrong drive path when trying to access it, which is bad enough, but also means no links or shortcuts work.

 

[Grizzly]

C:\ is automatically set as Windows partition, no matter what you do. This has been the case since the age of DOS.

 

[Dumbledazz]

C:\ is automatically set as Windows partition, no matter what you do. This has been the case since the age of DOS.

Right, okay I thought that might be the case but wasn't sure.

So continuing on, all my data files still have their drive letter as C i.e. "C:/user/apps/game". Windows doesn't recognize any of my data is there automatically, like I can still manually access it all by going from C to D in file explorer. Essentially everything stored in the D partition has the C:/ beginner instead of D:/.

So the question is, how can I easily access all those files and apps automatically through windows, without having to redownload everything?

 

[clifford_cooley]

C has always been designated as the first non-floppy partition. Notice I said non-floppy. Originally floppies were all there was. A and B were already used as floppy drives. The next available drive letter was C. So C became the first drive letter for hard drives. Initially you could only boot the first primary partition on the primary IDE port. With the boot partition being assigned C. Each additional volume was assigned the next available drive letter. Later on programming was added to Windows for allowing changes to drive letter assignments. However if I'm not mistaken the boot partition has to remain C.

Moving on to your question. Are you using game clients to manage your games? Some clients such as Steam allow adding additional game location folders.

 

[Bighorn]

Just set up a different computer last evening for running Linux Mint. Have to agree about C: but it doesn't matter which port on the motherboard is used for that drive, this install had the only HDD on the third port but still got assigned as C:. Also involved with older motherboards as to whether they support floppy drives, need their own port on the board.

One other thing, the Path to files use the backslash \ for separator while the forward slash / is used in the path/URL of Web addresses and for switches when running commands.

 

[clifford_cooley]

but it doesn't matter which port on the motherboard is used for that drive,

We are no longer using IDE ports either. Thankfully that changed with SATA.

 

[Dumbledazz]

Moving on to your question. Are you using game clients to manage your games? Some clients such as Steam allow adding additional game location folders.

I am, and that suggestion for Steam would likely work great, however, I do have other things which are likely not as easy, such as apps for University projects, as well as relevant files.

I know it's not ideal, but would just copying over all my data from the D partition to C fix this issue? Or is there a way I could easily change all the drive letters in partition D? As everything stored in partition D is currently marked as C.

 

[Bighorn]

I see a difficulty here. Drives can have 1 or more partitions [required to have at least one] and some partitions have drive letters but some don't that were set up when the computer was first built, are Windows-managed. This is Disk Management on my Win11 Notebook, shows only 1 drive and 1 USB drive: only one partition on the internal drive has a letter, C:. The second drive D: is a 2TB USB Thumb drive with only the single partition on it. Partitions can have only 1 letter assigned but one can have Folders as a single letter or single number for storing data in.

 

[clifford_cooley]

.... but would just copying over all my data from the D partition to C fix this issue? ....

Your data could yes. But any application that was installed. Will need to be reinstalled to the new location. This corrects any registry keys and other problems you may not know about.