Swapping system drive letters in dual boot setup

[pjfarr]

I set up an XP/Win7 dual boot system using 2 partitions on a single hard disk (XP was pre-installed). All seemed to go smoothly, except for the fact that I couldn't boot from the Win7 DVD for some reason. The process would start loading files from the DVD but would keep stalling just after the progress bar got to 100% and disappeared. After several attempts and trying 2 different DVD drives, I ended up just running the Win7 setup.exe from XP and that got the install completed.

The problem is when I boot into Win7 the system drive is designated as "W:\" not "C:\" ("W" is the letter I assigned to it when creating the partition that would hold Win7). I hate this. Some people mentioned in different how-to's I checked out that their dual boot system automatically designates the system drive as "C:\" regardless of which OS they boot into or partition letters assigned to each OS. How can I get that to work?

Everything else seems to be working properly when in either XP or Win7.

 

[raybay]

Depends a bit on computer and operating system, but whatever you have in your operating system for Computer Management, there is a section for Storage, and within that, Disk Management. With a few easy tricks, you can usually rename or re-name or re-label most hard drives.

 

[pjfarr]

Thanks ray.

I've used the Disk Management utility in XP before to get drive letters straight for extra HD's and optical drives on my system and it's not very complicated. I've just never used it for a system partition and a lot of what I read is confusing and contradictory so I'm nervous about the whole process.

Do you have any links to some of the "easy tricks to rename or re-label hard drives" you referred to, if they deal with dual boot systems and system drives/partitions? Preferably nothing too techy. An app that will do it all for me would be superb (but likely a pipedream?).

 

[DelJo63]

re-labelling is direct, easy and zero risk.

from an ADMIN login, get to the disk mgr
(right click My Computer->Manage)
right-click on the HD to be relabelled
click Properties
on the General Tab is the current Label
change it (no blanks!) and then click OK​

reordering the Boot Menu is very different and dependent upon how dual boot was created.