Change Drive Letter For Presumable Needed Boot Disk
Dec 5, 2009
Windows 7, 32 bit, 12 partitions on 3 hdd's, Windows 7 on C:
When migrating to Windows 7 I first tried to update my Vista which I had used happily for 2 years. Installation went fine, but there were too many problems after.
So I bought a new 1 GB hdd and installed Windows 7 there from scratch. It is on a partition with drive letter C. I copied most of my old partitions to the new hdd, went fine.
When trying to delete one of the old hdd's with EASEUS Partition Master Home 4.1.1 manager software, there is one partition on it (which once before was called C, then successfully renamed to Z ) which I can't delete. I has on it the following folders:
$RECYCLE.BIN
Boot
System Volume Information (locked)
-->and files:
BOOTSECT.BAK
bootmgr
They are only 30,5 MB in size. So I resized the partition to 1 GB.
EASEUS characterizes it as Status = System, Pri/Log = Primary. Windows Disc manager characterizes it as System, Active, Primary Partition.
My question is: Can I change the drive letter from Z to B without risking the whole system to be unbootable? (and maybe never be bootable again?) When trying I just get the usual Windows warning.
I would be most grateful for an answer explaning what and why or why not.
I lost my Event Viewer, and had to do a repair installation to fix it. Unfortunately, during the repair install, Windows decided to rename my second HD as the D: drive... it was K: before that. Now I cannot access any of my docs, pictures, music, or videos through the normal means... they don't show up in libraries or explorer, and apps like Restorator and Sure Thing (CD labeler) cannot find them. I think that means the paths are broken..?
It won't allow me to rename the HD back into K: (it's not listed as available). I can access the data by clicking Computer > D, and I can see the data is there, but its unusable as of now. Any ideas?
So I can't change the drive letter. Do I need to use Partition Magic again? The more I keep hearing/reading "do you have a backup?" - makes me believe the tool (OS) isn't capable of handling/accessing the data properly.
I want to change the drive letter of the drive on which Windows 7 is installed.It is currently F:, and I want to change it to K:It is not possible from the Disk Management as I tried.
In 7 everything is all right.7 is c: and the boot partition is hidden.
But in XP the hidden partition is c: and visible.XP is d:,so some programs use default dir can't work.I tried disk management to change xp to c: but didn't succeed.
Anyway to change the drive letters and hide the 100m partition?
I deleted my existing OS then created two new partitions on the same drive. Then I installed Vista on one partition and that partition was properly named "c" as ususal. Then I started Windows 7 setup.exe from a different hard drive and let Windows 7 install itself into its own partition. When I got to "My Computer" the Windows 7 partition was labelled as "I" instead of the expected "C" which had never happend before when I did the same thing.
Does anyone know a save way to label the Win 7 drive as "C" while in Windows 7?
I have an OCZ vertex 3 as my boot drive and a 2TB Hitachi drive as my storage drive. When I installed the system, I changed the 2TB drive letter name to G. Recently, I installed a card reader into my system, which somehow made one of the card slots G and the 2TB D. Now I can't run any of my programs installed on the mechanical drive. I can't even open diskpart
I have a USB external hard drive that I keep all my documents etc on (had it for years)I upgraded from Vista Home to & Home Premium then had to upgrade recently to Professional to run my Sage. Through all these upgrades my ext. drive ran fine. Occasionally the drvie letter would change if I had something else plugged into the USB, this was always easily corected in disk management by changing the drive path.The connection on the case packed up so I had to get the drive put into a new case, now when I plug it in the drive is assigned G instead of F, I tried to change the drive letter allocation in Disk Management but it won't let me as the program still thinks I have a second ext. hard drive which is labelled F. I suspect this has happened because when the usb connection broke the drive was disconnected suddenly instead of a proper eject.How do I get Disk Management to remove the inactive drive - i can't find any obvious way - eject, delete etc are all missing when I click on tools or tasks.
I had windows 7 on a SSD drive, assigned C: by windows 7, but it was full so I decided I'd clone it onto a bigger SSD drive using Acronis Disk Director. Went swimmingly I thought, both drives contained the same data. I wasn't too sure what my next step ought to be, whether acronis will have sorted it so that my new SSD now has the orginal SSD's drive letter or not. If it did, it will be mean a simple transition. But you guessed it, it left the drive letters the same, so when I booted up, it loaded from the orginal SSD. I then changed the original SSD drive letter, and used EasyBCD to remove the original boot and create a new one with the new SSD. Unfortunate now when I boot up Windows 7 I get a Preparing Your Desktop message for a couple of mins, but it's then followed by a screen with a cursor but no desktop icons or taskbar. It also seemed unresponsive to keyboard strokes.
C - Windows 7 Ultimate - SSD array D - Data - WD 640 spinner 1 E - Windows 7 Pro - 1st partition on WD 640 spinner 2 F - Windows 7 Enterprise - 2nd partition WD 640 spinner 2
Using Acronis True Image 2010, I keep 2 images of each OS on D.I'd like to put an image of C onto E, then make some changes to it. I think I tried this back in the Vista beta days, but can't recall if I ever got it to work, tempted to say "no".
After installing Windows 7 into a new partition, the OS started up fine from the new dual boot screen, but I didn't have access to my Win XP partition from within explorer. In disk management, I was able to add a letter to my WinXP volume (I took the next available "O") and it popped up in explorer no problem. However, after restarting, Win 7 begins to load, then BSODs way too fast to think about catching with camera.
I got the option to run startup repair at the restart, and I did so. The conclusion there was that I had plugged in a device during the last session that was now causing problems. That is bogus, unless that device is my newly lettered partition. I read many a thread in here about re-lettering a partition that had lost its letter in the install (usually the other OS volume in a dual-boot environment), but didn't see those posters then have issues upon restart.
I can boot into XP, although here now NONE of my drives have letters.
Any Help? I really was diggin' my Windows 7 time, and really enjoyed taking advantage of all my RAM and x64 versions of CS4 and CAD.
My Floppy Drive has the drive letter assignment (A). I would rather have it be (F). The traditional way to change drive letters is under disk management on right-click of My Computer. However, Floppy drives are not visible in the list. How can I change the letter?
My backup software's profile database is expecting to backup to H:, which was the drive letter for my external backup drive back in XP. This drive comes up in Windows 7 as K, because Windows 7 has given my four usb card reader drives the letters F,G,H,I.
Disk Management will not show these four card reader drives unless media is inserted (connected vs. disconnected). I have changed the letters for F,G,I to T,U,W, but only because I have those types of cards (SD, CF, MS)...I do not have an XD or SmartMedia card for the one dang drive I really need to change.
What are my options, other than buying the cheapest SM card I can find to make the drive visible for this task? The SmartSyncPro database has many profiles, so remapping all those to point to K would be a major hassle.
I have built a computer for video editing and named the hard drives (C for the main drive, (M for the drive holding my music, (P for the drive for photos, and I named the drive to store my videos (V. However when I tried to write path to the V: drive I was told V: is an invalid path, I suppose because of the confusion with a followed by a / which would give you a / which can be confused with V but is not exactly the same. I went to My Computer and right clicked on the V: drive and clicked on "rename" in the drop down menu and changed the name to "Storage" but the (V persisted. Then I renamed again and named the drive "Storage (S" and now in "My Computer" the drive is shown as "Storage (S (V" When writing a path to put videos on this drive can I use either S:/ or V:/ to get videos into this drive? Is there some way to remove the (V
Had an XP dual boot with Windows 7 RTM. Deleted XP C: drive and moved RTM D: drive over into it's space. I would like to keep and license this installation using retail Windows 7 Ultimate Signature Edition received with party pack.
Is there a way to change the Windows 7 D: drive to C: by running a repair install (upgrade over OS) as I would like to find a way to do this without having to do a clean install.
I was asked by a client to get data off a circa 2004 PC that has a blown Power Supply. I removed the HDD and proceeded with my usual recovery procedure using a drive adapter cable and power supply. The problem is that I can see the drive in the Win7 Disk Manager, but I can't mount the partition. Most of the time I've not had problems with Win7. It usually just recognizes the drive and assigns a letter to the active primary partition. In this case, I can see the partition, it's active and healthy, but I can't assign it a letter. In fact, all options are "greyed out" except "Delete Partition."I've also used MiniTool Partition Wizard, but without success. Partition Wizard can assign a letter to the partition, which then shows up in Windows Explorer. If you click on the drive letter, you get the "J:\ refers to a location that is unavailable ...." I can explore the partition with Partition Wizard, but I'm unable to access the files.
Here are the Hardware particulars:Old HDD: 80GB Maxtor HDD ATA, formatted with 76GB primary partition, Active, NTFS, This was the boot drive for a PC I'm using Win7 x64. The drive is connected to my machine using a SATA/IDE Combo Drive adapter connected to a USB port on my machine. It uses the standard USB to SATA Serial Bridge Driver.
Ok so here's a little backstory before I jump into my problem. I've got 2 harddrives installed; a SSD and a regular HDD. The SSD is labeled C: since it has Windows and other core programs while the HDD is labeled B:. The solid state is almost full while the regular one still has over a terabyte of space left to fill up. Normally, I have no problem installing new programs or games to the HDD till now.When I went to install my new game on B: it kept giving me invalid directory errors. So I went to the game's forums and discovered that the reason that issue was happening was because the game recognized drive letters A and B as floppy drives as opposed to hard drive letters. Further investigation revealed that apparently this little bit of design is hardcoded into the game and there really isn't any work around except changing the drive letter. So I looked up how to do so and made the change.....then the problems started.After changing the drive letter from B: to Z: I kept getting 'path does not exist' error message with features and hardware connected to Windows on C:.
For example, my DVD-ROM drive is labeled D: and everytime I tried to install the game after the drive letter change I got 'D:\, path does not exist. make sure the path is correct and try again' error. Another example, when trying to go to Device Manager to start a fix I couldn't because of 'explorer.exe, path does not exist' error. Basically, every step I tried where anything was connected to C: or D: I got the 'path does not exist' error. At this point I've done a system restore to before the drive letter changed and I'm running as I was before trying to install the game.My question is, how do I change the driver letter of my HDD without getting all the 'path does not exist' errors? If that's not possible, how do I fix the 'path does not exist errors' when the path starts with C: or D:? Is it done the same way I would with a program through the properties tab in the target path section and start in section? Or is there something more invasive I need to do when the path issue starts with C: and D:
I recently set up a new Systemax SYX-1113 PC with a SSD (C:) for Win 7 Pro and a 1TB HDD (G:) for my user libraries and programs. I need to upgrade the HDD from a 1GB to a 2 GB drive so I cloned the 1TB (G:) drive to a new 2TB (H:) drive. My new challenge is figuring out how to switch the drive letters on the two HDDs so that Windows looks to the new drive for the user directories and program files. I tried using disk manager in Windows 7 and got the BSOD - I guess it didn't like me changing the location of the active user profile. I assume I need to boot the PC from something other than the C: drive to make the change.
I have an external HDD that works on any other machine I test it on, except mine. It was working and for some reason I recently needed to use it and it didn't work. It appears in device manager but not in disk management. A drive letter might not be assigned to it, I can't see it in disk management to assign a drive letter to it.
I formatted and installed windows 7 64 bit in a pc which previously had windows 7 32 bit. When i booted my 1tb dynamic disk was not detected. So I went into disk management and it had listed my disk as "Foreign Disk". So i imported the foreign disk.
The drive was detected and opened. So i rebooted the pc but now the drive is still not appearing in my computer. When i go to disk management the 1tb appears but there is no drive letter assigned. When i try to assign drive letter it statest that "Specified File cannot be found"
I recently built my computer and installed a ssd and a hdd, the OS is on the ssd which is the c drive but since it is smaller than the hdd I tried to change the letters around and make the hdd the c drive using regedit because the default install location seems to be the c drive and after restarting the computer it boots up and says preparing your desktop then goes to a blue screen with just the cursor. I tried booting in safe mode and all I get there is a black screen also
my boot drive leter. recently bought a ssd installed my edition of win7pro 64 onto it no problems except i had my old hdd still plugged in which was my c drive letter ,thus i installed operating system onto my ssd with an e drive letter.ok so i have tried to run a couple of programmes which i use which have failed because the programme is looking for a specific file in c boot directory which i obviously havent got....hope you can understand what im getting at.so big question how do i change my ssd boot drive letter to :c and that all my existing programmes will still work.
On my home built system, when booting up, if I don't have this generic Dell usb keyboard hooked up, I can not choose from multiple drives I have installed with the Logitech G510 keyboard( which I use to choose, I just have to have this other keyboard connected). Other than that, it behaves normally, fine.Is there something I can do in the way of getting a driver onto a usb thumb drive and then keep that thumb drive permanently attached (like inside the case)?
I'm not sure what the trigger was but my C drive where my os is installed apparently took the drive letter of an external drive that I use for backup. It is now the X drive and I cannot boot. I do get the repair screen but cannot repair as there is no operating system to choose. Booting from windows disk makes no difference here.My bios (uefi) can see the disk, I can also see it from the command prompt?
My goal is to run a Windows 7/Windows 7 dual boot system with one installation for day to day operations (MAIN) and then second installation strictly for gaming (GAMER).
I have successfully installed Windows 7 twice. During clean install i created 30GB partition (C: ) and put MAIN there. No problems. I loaded that up and from within Disk Management created a second partition on the same physical drive and named it (D: ).
I booted from the Windows 7 install DVD and then installed GAMER to the (D: ) partition. No problems. I am able to boot into each installation (MAIN and GAMER) from the boot manager without any troubles.
When I boot into the MAIN installation, the system path/partition is (C: ) and the os files for the second installation, GAMER, can be seen on (D: ) just fine.
However, when i boot into the GAMER installation, its system path is also (C: ) and the partition for MAIN somehow got renamed to (G: )
I would like it so that when I boot into MAIN (which was installed to C: ), that partition stays named (C: ) and when i boot into GAMER (which was installed to D: ), that partition stays named (D: ). Eventhough both installations see themselves as (C: ) when i boot into them, it does not seem to cause any problems.
So how should I do my second Windows 7 installation to a partition named (D: ) and force it to keep that name when i boot into it?
I'm using multiple hard drives to install both fedora and Windows 7. I've followed this online tutorial exactly: Dual-booting Fedora 14 and Windows 7 on a computer with 2 hard drives
The problem I seem to be facing is on the "Add a new Entry Step". His secondary OS partition has a drive letter assigned to it and I do not. I've gone into computer management and have tried to assign a drive letter to either of my secondary OS's hard drive partitions and it will not let me.
All I need is the boot loader to link to my second hard drive when the second option (OS) is chosen.
I have windows XP pro 32 bit installed in C drive and then installed clean win 7 64bit in drive D. Everything works properly but when I boot from XP, it is in C drive and I see Windows 7 in D drive, when I boot from Windows 7, I see win 7 in C and winXP in D drive. Is it normal or is there any I can do to fix win Xp in C and Windows 7 in D?
I originally was running Windows Vista x64 as my sole operating system. When the Windows 7 beta came out, I created a new partition and began dual-booting. I have been using that beta as my primary OS for several months, I think, keeping the other drive and the dual boot capability. I can't remember for sure, since I have blank DVDs but can't find a Windows 7 beta DVD, but I -think- that my method of installing the Windows 7 beta was as follows:
1. Mount Windows 7 beta ISO with Daemon Tools Lite
2. Run the setup program from it (or maybe I extracted the ISO to a directory and then ran the setup)
3. Install Windows 7 to the D: partition that I had created, while running Vista
4. The beta automatically configured dual boot. If I booted Vista, Vista viewed "itself" as drive C, and Windows 7 as something like drive D. If I booted Windows 7, it viewed "itself" as drive C, and Windows Vista as drive E. This was perfect.
I've been putting off installing the RC due to being busy/lazy, but I finally tried doing it over the weekend. I have tried four times, and all four have met with the same fate. The dual-boot configuration that gets generated looks right. Windows Vista boots viewing "itself" as drive C, and 7 as drive D. Windows 7, however, views "itself" as drive D, and Windows Vista as drive C.
well i wanted to change an old laptop to an ssd and I was wondering whether I could in fact do this wothout the licence becoming invalid. it has a COA but it doesn't say oem or have a manufacturers name on it. I googled it and it said you could change most if not the motherboard; but i read conflicting opinions on whether you could change the main boot drive
