How do rearrange drive letters?

lightarts wrote:

I wiped my system clean, installed a new master drive, and began
reinstalling all my software.

NTFS remembers drive letters. This is different from FAT (which was used in Windows 98 and earlier) that dynamically assigned drive letters based on partition types and IDE assignments.

What likely happened is you had the old master and new master in the system at the same time. Your problem was that XP saw that the old master had a bootable OS partition (it's not that it was a master drive) XP saw that "C:" was in use and picked the next available drive letter for the new bootable OS partition.

You can not repair this. I've tried and it's terribly difficult. XP will not let you change the system partition drive letter (Disk Management). The solution is to do some registry editing by hand to swap the partition letters and then track down every place that the old drive letter is referenced.

You need to remove the old drive, then reinstall XP on the new drive (this time it wll be "C"), shutdown the system and boot back up with the old drive. XP will see the confilct with the old bootable partition and should reletter it... if not it'll disable it until you give it a new letter in Disk Management (My Computer -> Manage)