New hard drive, need to change letter designation, but...

[rosavola]

Anyway, I installed a new 80 gig HD to take the place of the aging 40 gig in my older PC operating Windows XP. I used clonning software to duplicate the old drive. I planned to use the older HD as additional storeage. But, now, after booting off the new drive (I think, as it is designated as drive 0, master. And the old drive set to drive 1, slave in the bios) it loads everything else off the old drive as it is designated C:

Under Disk Management I see I can change drive letter designations but, since the old drive is set at C: I am unable to change it or reformat as it is still used by some software. I want to replace it with the new drive (currently F:) then, use my old drive for further storeage.

What to do now?   

[contrex]

What do you mean "it loads everything else"?

You cloned the 40 GB onto the 80 GB drive, right?

The 80 GB drive is an exact copy of the 40 GB drive in every way?

If you remove the 40 GB drive altogether, does the system boot from the 80 GB drive?

If the answer to these questions is "yes",

disconnect the 80 GB drive

reconnect the 40 GB drive

boot from a floppy disk

format the 40 GB drive

connect the 80 GB drive as master

connect the 40 GB as slave

The now blank 40 GB drive is ready for use as storage.
 

[rosavola]

Does it boot from the 80 after the 40 is removed ?

Answer is no. It does not get as far as the welcome screen. Comes to a hault just before.

I thought my proceedure would be an easy way of going about this without buying backup software. Maybe not.

[contrex]

How did you clone the 40 GB drive? You mentioned cloning software.

[patio]

Whenever this procedure is used it involves re-setting jumpers...i think what happened is you successfully cloned the old to new and re-booted without changing jumpers...
Contrex's fix above should work first time...
If they don't remove the 40G ribbon cable...make sure the 80G is jumpered to master and try again...

Note: Some drives have a " master with slave present" setting...if this is true in your case this is how the 80G should be jumpered.