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Is there any problems caused by having Windows XP installed to a drive letter other than C:?

Is there any problems caused by having Windows XP installed to a drive letter other than C:?

I fixed a friends computer yesterday. It was BSODing on startup every boot. It turned out something was up with his Windows partition, the Windows install/rescue CD could not read it, and neither could the installed OS. So I booted a Linux LiveCD, backed up all the data, deleted the partition, and recreated it with the Windows install CD during installation.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 328
Total answers/comments: 1
Guest [Entry]

"Windows itself and other Microsoft software will be fine.

Well written software that doesn't make unsafe assumptions about that C: does and does not represent, will be fine too.

Unfortunately while most software does this the right way (using the relevant environment variables or registry lookups to find the right location for the user's profile or ""program files"") there is still some software out there that doesn't decide where to store/access things the right way and instead uses hard coded paths. Such software will fail to work correctly if Windows is not installed with the default system drive mapping. Having said that - if a peice of software gets this simple thing wrong you are probably better off not running it at all because <insert deity here> only knows what else its creator is getting wrong..."