I have XP on a laptop with one hard drive and a DVD drive. The hard 
drive is a replacement and has only one partition. When I installed the 
OS on the brand new (empty) drive, the OS assigned the letter G to the 
hard drive and letter D to the DVD drive. Since everything installed and 
worked, I did not notice that the hard drive designation was not C and I 
installed a number of programs without any problems. Only until one of 
my Microsoft programs "could not find drive C" did I realize something 
was out of the ordinary. However, since the laptop is not a critical 
machine for me, it is not worth the effort to correct the situation so I 
have been using it for several years with a drive G designation rather 
than C without any problems except installing that one program. An older 
version of the program does install but not later versions. I do not 
even remember what program it is.

Tom

On 6/14/2011 7:46 AM, Felix Miata wrote:
> On 2011/06/14 02:00 (GMT-0400) Peter Ekkerman composed:
>
>> You can change the drive letter on the CD/VDD drive and put it late 
>> in the
>> alphabet soup ,like W. (via Disk Management)
>
> I always make mine R:, for cd-Rom, dvd-Rom, bluray-Rom
>
>> The only way to resolve it is to re-install the OS-   Of course after 
>> you
>> have changed the drive letter for the CD/DVD drive.
>
> I've not tried with Vista or W7 yet, but other Win versions from 95 up 
> always assign C: to a primary partition, the boot partition. When 
> installing the operating system to a logical partition, the installer 
> always assigns some other letter of its choice based upon the location 
> of other existing partition types it recognizes. I normally arrange 
> mine so that the first it finds is also the install target, which 
> results in a D: assignment for the operating system.
>
> For his to have been assigned H: means there must have been other 
> recognizable partitions (e.g. types B, 7, C or 6) closer to the front 
> of the drive than the installation target.

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