Wrong hard drive letters showing up in windows installation

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Hello. I was going to reformat windows today and I noticed something bizarre. The drive letters are showing up wrong in windows setup when I put my windows xp setup disc in my computer. Could this be because I used partition manager to steal some space from another partition of mine to make it bigger? I'm just kind of stumped here. When I boot up windows and go into "my computer" the partition with windows installed on it is C: , my biggest partition with my music and other big files on it is D:, and my other hard drive which is seperate for extra files is listed as being drive E:. Well, in windows setup drive letter C: shows up as the partition with windows installed on it (which is the only drive letter that is correct), D: shows up as being my 2nd hard drive and E: shows up as being the largest partition for my music and big files. Anybody know why this is? It's kind of bizzare.

The algorithm that Windows uses to allocate drive letters is bizarre.

Something like...

The first primary partitions on the master drives on the two IDE slots are given C and D.

Then the secondary drives, first primary partitions get E and F.

Then, the other primary partitions and logical partitions, in a similar pattern, one drive at a time.

Now, I can't remember whether it takes any note of which partition is marked bootable.

I can't recall if CD/DVD drives come in the middle or at the end.

Anyway, once you have an installed system, you can change the drive letters around.

That will be totally ignored when you re-install.

Also, all bets are off if you have SATA/USB drives in there. I've no idea where it puts those.

You can always reassign drive letters for non-os partitions, according to your liking.

You can always reassign all partitions. One of my two XPs is on drive F (which I made a logical partition on the master drive on the second IDE slot). I forget where I put the other one... I think it's the third primary partition on my master on IDE0.

When installing, you DON'T get any choice. The installation allocates drive letters according to a silly algorithm that makes little sense.

Ok, thanks guys. So what you are saying is that I should just ignore the stupid lettering system that the windows installation uses?

You can set it to give the same letter to a drive, but it doesn't matter if the partition has a label.