second hard drive in XP PC - what drive letter?

[aclivity]

Currently I have my hard drive (HD0) assigned as C:, DVD / CD drive is D:, and the multifunction card reader occupies E: to H:.

I'm adding a second hard drive, so I want to reallocate the drive letters. Is there any problem with bumping the DVD / CD up to E:? The card reader is now F: to I:, just wondering whether to have D: as HD1 or DVD really.

Any suggestions?

Andy

[Muntu]

Nope, assign whatever you want

[aclivity]

Thanks ... it's been a while since I installed a drive on a Microsoft machine ... I think it was a DOS machine that I last did this on!

[Paul Drawmer]

You'll be surprised just how easy it is now then.

On many machines, you don't need a screwdriver.

Still be full of dust and crap though.

[-DeaDLocK-]

When you first install it it will assign it the next available letter, but you can use Windows drive management to move it around.

The only issue I can forsee with bumping your optical drive from D: to anything else is that any programs with hardcoded references to installation files or data on D: (Windows itself, for example) will cough a little when they try to look for files on CDs or DVDs but don't find them.

Not that hard to fix when the problems do crop up, and they should be few and far between, but just so you're aware.

[aclivity]

Paul Drawmer said:

You'll be surprised just how easy it is now then.

On many machines, you don't need a screwdriver.

Still be full of dust and crap though.

The actual installation bit was easy - a slide-in bay, power lead was already in place, so just needed to plug in the SATA cable. Luckily I had cleared the dust a few weeks ago (checking there was a spare drive bay available) so there wasn't too much dust (still surprising how much accumulates in only a few weeks).

It was the windows bit that foxed me - it could see the drive in hardware manager, but I couldn't actually use it. I had to go into device manager to partition then assign a drive letter.

This has taken my total home online storage to just over 1Tb! I recall being overwhelmed when we got our first 30Mb PC at work - 3 times larger hard drive than the previous PC, and the ones before that which had 2 x 360kb floppy drives.