[adamvelvetu]

I use two hard drives, a smaller one that runs XP and a larger one for primarily storage. I replaced the storage drive...this had been the "first" drive and was labeled c: while the one running XP was labeled d:

I installed the new drive and rebooted. In the process, the volume labels flipped: the primary drive became c: and the storage drive becoming d:

This has thrown Windows into a world of confusion and all previously installed programs show up as uninstalled. They are still there in "program files" but many of them refuse to open, reporting not being able to find .dll files which I can search for and find on the computer.

Is this a registry issue? Is there a way to reconcile it without installing all this software again?

Thanks for any help.

[GTechWiz]

Hmmm, now that is a tough questions, not having had the pleasure of experiencing this, I'd say, my next step would be to....

I would assign the new drive a new Letter, and then reassing C drive the D letter, and then make the new drive, drive C.

Then reboot...

[johnebadbak]

did you check the jumper setting on the new drive against the setting on the old drive removed.and installed this device in the exact position as the original drive.
just by default windows wants "C:" to be the system drive .and is the primary connection.to the device.

[TheOutcaste]

Follow the steps in this article to set the Windows drive letter back to D:
How to restore the system/boot drive letter in Windows

I'm guessing it was previously booting from the old C: drive, and since the new drive doesn't have an active partition or the proper boot files, it's using the active partition on what used to be the D: drive, which happened to have the proper boot files. This will change the drive letter, but the above article should fix it.

[adamvelvetu]

Thanks guys...neither options seemed to work though. The last one really confused the computer and led to to some "looped restarting". I'm going to perform a manual system restore through the XP disc and then just re-install the other programs.

[adamvelvetu]

correct that...the last option of renaming the drive letters did not work because i didn't follow the steps properly. i screwed up at step 8 so i assume that solution would've worked if not for my error.