I think the most evil thing about modern desktop computers is drive letters. Why didn’t Microsoft rid itself of this horrible concept earlier?
I’m working at a client’s house, trying to upgrade laptops from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. So, the last time I was here, I allocated 10GB of space at the front of the drive for the new system drive for XP. Now when I use the Windows installer to format it as NTFS, it marks it as “F:” Partition3. Which means, when I install XP, the system drive will be F:, and then when I eventually rid myself of the existing two drives, the system will break (probably with the infamous INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE stop error).
So, the trick I’m going to use to get around this is prior to installing Windows, I’ll boot off a boot CD, hide both existing NTFS partitions, reboot, install Windows on the now-drive-C:, and then unhide those partitions later so that they show up as D: and E: (I hope).
Argh. The least the installer could have done is allowed me to hide the drives from within here. It takes for-ever to load up the Windows installer again.