What is the difference between a windows Boot drive and a system drive?

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Pswayze

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 8, 2008
Messages
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This problem all stems from the fact I want to change a drive letter of a drive that is NOT my boot drive, which should be quite easy. I reinstalled Windows last night on the same drive it was on before (C drive). Before installing, I detached all my other drives to avoid confusion. The install completed, I booted up, turned off again, and then reattached my 3 other drives. Two of the three drives complied with my wished to change their drive letter. The third, however, kicks me an error saying that it is a system drive and "Windows cannot modify the drive letter of your system volume or boot volume."

What have I done?
 
Boot drive has boot loader & boot sectors on it.
System drive has windows on it.

If they aren't the same in your system, then it is probably because you installed windows when both disks were present in the system, and the one that became "BOOT" was the one that the BIOS returned first, and the one that is "SYSTEM" is the one that you picked to install windows on (and likely became C: but that may or may not be the case)

Since you installed with only one drive, it is also likely that one of the other drives HAS a valid boot sector on it already (possibly from a previous windows install) and is currently the 'first' drive the BIOS tries to boot, and thus the system uses that for the boot sector but ends up using another drive with the windows install. I would check into the bios/boot order stuff.
 
Pswayze said:
I reinstalled Windows last night on the same drive it was on before (C drive). Before installing, I detached all my other drives
Click to expand...
Are you sure you did?

The third, however, kicks me an error saying that it is a system drive and "Windows cannot modify the drive letter of your system volume or boot volume."
Click to expand...
Enter the BIOS and make sure the drive you installed Windows on has boot priority over all the other drives.
 
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