Hello. I feel your pain, I had similar issues a few years ago. Took a lot of time. 🙁
In case of HDDs Win 9x keeps the order given from the BIOS (or if it's a partition from the MBR).
This is often something like Floppy->HDD->CD->Removable drives->Network drives
Win XP uses Volume IDs for each HDD or their partitions.
All of NT's important internal stuff is using them (except win32 sub system and some drivers).
So it should be possible to safely reassign drive letters.
But it's strange that Win9x is still on C while you're running XP.
That shouldn't happen. C is or should be always the boot up drive.
I'd recommend to remove all other drives and get this fixed first.
If all this doesn't help try repairing the NT loader (fixboot, fixmbr from the recovery console) but make a backup first.

Maybe there's something you can use on Mr. Sieber's homepage :
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/drivetools_e.html

He has a lot of interessting utilities for DOS and Windows (including self written stuff).
I'm browsing his page every now and then..

And as a last resort you can use old MSCDEX in Win9x instead of CDFS and force the CD drive to letter D.
See details here: http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000038.htm

That's all I can think of so far.

But maybe the others have any ideas ?

(Come on, people! A lot of you have dual boot setups, don't you ? 😉)

Never install another OS with the other OS's hdds still connected, or any other hdd for that matter.

When You installed XP You should have disconnected the W98 drive, that would have solved this issue, unfortunately You
now have to reinstall XP to fix this. I've been there, done that before.
Another idea would be to format NTFS for XP, but then Win98 will not see the other drives, but XP will see W98 of course,
but You still need to disconnect W98 Hdd.

I had a similar issue to the one you've described. I used a freeware program called Letter Assigner by Vadim Burtyansky. It allows me to change drive letters in Windows 98SE. There are a few limitations to what it can do, but for the most part it works great, and solved my problem.

I've attached the program below for your convenience 😀

Hope it helps.

For years I had come to accept the fact that drive letter assignment is seldom possible with Windows 9x and NT, especially together on one PC. I'll have to try Letter Assigner, thanks.

Totempole wrote:

I had a similar issue to the one you've described. I used a freeware program called Letter Assigner by Vadim Burtyansky. It allows me to change drive letters in Windows 98SE. There are a few limitations to what it can do, but for the most part it works great, and solved my problem.

I've attached the program below for your convenience 😀

Hope it helps.

Thanks! It worked perfect and was very easy to use. Problem solved.

I am trying Letter Assigner for the first time. I changed the letter of a second IDE device to L and an extended FAT32 partition on the primary device to D. After restarting the system, it no longer boots.

Here are the error messages. Is anyone familiar with this software or the problem? It says that it can't find SYSTEM.INI, but it is still located at C:\Windows. Maybe this has something to do with windir in the previous message.

I don't see anything wrong with the windir environment variable, and I'm not sure what this program actually did.

I used SCANREG /RESTORE and chose an option for yesterday's date, but I get the same error on boot. I have no idea what the problem is now.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-07-14, 00:08:

I used SCANREG /RESTORE and chose an option for yesterday's date, but I get the same error on boot. I have no idea what the problem is now.

Did you patch WinME DOS? I ask because WinME doesn't look at anything in the AUTOEXEC.BAT (or CONFIG.SYS) for startup other than to move environment variables to the registry. If you DIR, can you see System.ini? Have you tried to repair the MBR? Can you move the drive letters back to original location with the software from DOS?

I have installed the WinME DOS. I wonder if this is creating a conflict where the software is getting confused.

I restored a backup of my Windows folder and only installed the software without changing any of the drive assignments and the problem returned. So now I'm even more suspicious as to what it's doing.

Edit:

It's definitely something to do with the ME/DOS patch. I installed ME in a VM and tested that the drive letter changer works fine. Then I applied the DOS patch and it broke with the same error. Restoring the original IO.SYS fixed the problem, but disabled booting to DOS.

I wonder what the problem is?