Im never messing with another computer again!

[CHayes1126]

I really messed this one up guys. Here is my story: I updated my motherbaord and processor and left everything else alone. I had two hard drives one 30 gig which contained windows and a 120 gig that contained files. When I went to reformat on my new system I created a partition and formated the C drive. I then installed windows and everything looked good. It wasnt till I went into my computer that I figured out what had happened. The drive with windows on it is now called D: and it is my 30 gig. The 120 gig now shows 93 gigs and is named C:. My question is, how in the world do I switch the name of the two so that the drive with windows is C and vise versa. Also the 120 gig had files on it before I mistakenly created a partition on it. How do I either A. retrieve the missing files, or B reformate to show all 120 gigs? I know I shouldnt be messing with computers any more. I do more harm than good but if anyone can pull me outta this mess ill owe you one!

[diver203_98]

Well, there is some good news, and some bad.

You should be able to go into "my computer" and right click and rename your drives. That is the good news. Now for the bad. When you reformatted and partitioned your system, and somehow got your drives mixed up and reformatted and partitioned the wrong drive, you lost all your programs. What I would have done, is disconnected the second drive that contained your programs when I reformatted and partitioned. That way there wouldn't have been any chance of geting the drives mixed up. That would have saved your programs.

Edit...

If you just renamed your drives you would be basically in the same boat. Meaning your large drive would still contain windows. Since you lost all your information already, you could reformat and partition the drives again. That way you would be able to get Windows back on the smaller drive, and free up your large drive again for your programs.

[CHayes1126]

The only problem is that I cannot get the drive to sow its full 120GB... I had files on it and made the drive go down to 93. So now whenever I try and reformat the driv, it says capacity is 93 and cannot be changed. Any ideas?

[Alfie]

Go to control panel,administrative tools,system management,disk manager and you should see all the drives there.
If the disk has an active partitionXP will only format the first part of the partition,the rest of the formatting is done while in XP and can be done so from disk management,do the different partitions show in my computer,if they do,you can right click any drive (excluding the boot partition) and format that way.

[CHayes1126]

Disk manager will not let me format nor change the names of my drives.

[Pernundel]

Which version of windows is it?

[Mesaeus]

I don't think you can change the drive letter of the System drive anyway. System = the drive/partition where you installed Windows 2000/XP. So it will remain D: forever, unless you reinstall but even then it can be hard to get Windows to give it the right drive letter. My brother once discovered a bug in the Windows XP setup, where each time you create and delete a partition in the Windows Setup program, it takes the next drive letter for the new partition. He called me to ask if it was normal that his Windows partition was O: (yes the letter O)

On the same subject, I had to disconnect my two additional hard drives while installing XP to prevent them from bumping the System partition to G:. It sure is a bit tricky

[CHayes1126]

HAHA thats pretty funny, drive O:. Never heard of that! The drive letter is not really a problem for me. The real problem is getting my 120GB back. I talked to my IT department at work, they told me there are some HD software available that will recover that for me. Does anyone know of any free ones?

[Alfie]

Is drive manager showing the partition?
If it is make it active.

[CHayes1126]

n its not, just the drive