Boot Drive Letter Changed After Cloning To New SATA Drive
May 25, 2004
I installed a Serial ATA hard drive. Booted from floppy,partitioned and formatted 120mb HD,with 2 partitions.
Connected my old IDE drive and booted from Norton Ghostdisc, cloned my old drive to the new one. Removed all drives and USB card readers except the new SATA drive. Windows will not fully boot, it halts at the blue Windows intro screen. Restarted Windows, and scandisk ran, but indicated drive letter "H" not "C", so I guess the windows installation is still looking in the original place for it's files, ie. the "C" drive, that's why it won't boot. You cannot change the "System" drive letter from "Computer Management" within XP, and I cannot get into Windows anyway. Is there a "work around" for this, other than a clean install? Even then, is it still going to be drive "H"? And that means another Windows activation. How many goes do you get for activation? I tried a windows repair installation, and reactivation (wasted). Windows then worked, sort of. Lots of things were missing and programs unuseable,as they were looking for their files on "C": so I went back to square 1, put my old drive back in for the moment
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Oct 8, 2008
I recently installed a new hard drive into a friends computer and installed XP Home.
I ran all the updates and service packs.
I left later that day and let him install all his applications.
I got a call tonight from him saying he really screwed up and doesn't know what to do.
I had to follow his thinking over the phone so I hope I get this all correct.
He had trouble loading the drivers for his HP printer. He would get an error saying that a C: empHP_WebRelease folder was missing. He did manage to figure out that for some reason when I installed XP it called the Boot drive "I" instead of "C"
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Jan 3, 2006
I have Windows XP Home Edition, SP2 on two separate bootable hard drives in my Dell XPS B1000r. I have my 80 GB �main� hard drive and a 40 GB �extra� hard drive. I mainly boot from my �main� 80 GB hard drive, and that�s the drive that won�t boot after I changed the drive letter.
I wanted to rename the Drive letters associated with each of these hard drives. I was able to change the �extra� hard drive using the Disk Management option. I was not able to change the letter of my �main� hard drive, because I booted from it. I used Regedit to change the boot drive letter, based on the Microsoft Help & Support article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default...;EN-US;Q223188
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Jan 22, 2006
I bought a computer for my wife and kids. Well months go by and my wife tries to install something and notices that the MAIN drive is H: not C:
I figured that it was weird but no big deal. Well I purchased a printer for her and while trying to install the software it was giving me a "Windows - No Disk in Drive" error.
I did some research and spoke to HP tech support and they suggested that I search the web for a way to change the drive letters from H: (current hard drive) to C: (supposed to be default drive)
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May 29, 2006
After reformating my pc, my secondary hard drive is now designated as drive "D". Before the reformat it was drive "G". I have software that needs to get data from drive "G" but the drive is not designated as "G" any longer. I can't remember how to reassign the drive letters so that I can designate the secondary drive as "G".
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Sep 6, 2008
My external drive has always been "E" and I have several desktop shortcuts that relate. Recently I inserted a flash drive containing home movies and after viewing and a reboot later I noticed that my external drive is now shown as "New Volume F". I would like to change it back to "E"
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Sep 2, 2006
I have a Dell Pentium 4 computer that has it's C: drive changed to the drive letter F: which causes some problems for me. I would like to know how I can change it back to C: without reloading my OS.
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Mar 21, 2010
I installed a new hard drive, the only drive, in my computer and installed XP pro. There was a card reader in the computer which was assigned c drive and the local drive was assigned h on the disk. I disconcected the card reader and changed the local disk to c from h in the registery. Now when I turn on the computer the blue screen introducing XP comes on and goes no farther.
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Oct 19, 2006
When XP Pro was functional I had 4 partitions on my 30 gig laptop drive in the following order as the appeared physically on the disk:
1: C: - a 2 gig dos partition for ancient non xp emulation compatible software
2: A linux partition for a common distro
3: the swap partition for the linux distro
4: E: - a 14 gig xp pro ntfs partition with my xp pro system files on it..
Now I believe my CD-ROM was using D: at this time for some reason or another... I don't quite remember for sure, but I am 100% positive that my system part was on E:
So I grab paragon partition manager and wipe the linux partition and merge it with the E: partition.. I must have really messed something up in the merge because it ended up changing my e: system part to d:. So now the system goes all the way through the first windows xp splash screen and hangs on the second one, after it loads the gui and before it provides the login prompt. I've set up a BartPE disk so that I could load the hkey_local_user hive to rename the mounted drives, but I must be doing something wrong because it saves the changes i make to the mounted drive d: to e: but it does not actually change the name of the mounted drive... it's still showing up as D:.. I have not tried a repair install because I assume it will not work due to the fact that it will detect the windows OS on d: and will probably just correct the OS and not any of the applications installed. Instead of attempting this I would rather blow away the part and start over from scratch which I will when I get tired of fooling with this.
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Nov 26, 2009
I have a dual boot system with both having windows xp.When I load into the 1st XP installation, the following is the list and assignment of the drives:
C : Local Disk (contains the 1st XP installation)
D : CD Drive
E : Local Disk (contains data and also few installed program folders)
F : Local Disk (contains the 2nd XP installation)
Initially when I noticed this drive arrangement after setting up the dual boot, I just left it as is, not knowing what to do.But nowadays I am having a lot of problems as the installed programs are not accessible because their target location keeps changing, everytime I keep switching between the two operating systems.How can I solve this problem?Can I do the follwing : Load into the 1st XP installation, and then change the drive letters (of the last three drives) such that they are matching the drive assignment as seen when loading into the 2nd XP installation.Here in a way I have kept the same drive name for both installations.But Will this work?I also have some of the program folders for the 1st xp installation stored in E drive, and after changing it to D drive, will all the links be properly converted upon restart?
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Apr 3, 2007
I have successfully cloned my primary c partition of a dual boot system with XP Pro on the 1st primary partition c: and XP Pro on the 2nd primary partition as d: I can boot into my XP on the c: drive with no problem, but when I attempt to boot into my XP on the D drive it hangs on the blue screen right before booting into the user profiles. And believe it or not it continuously loops making the windows startup sound and the shutdown sound. It does the same in safe mode. I will try to explain the process on what I did so it can help you experts figure out this dilemma that I'm having. My old drive an IDE 100GB IBM primary drive was partitioned into 3 parts:
c: 30GB FAT32 primary
d: 30GB FAT32 "
e: 30gb FAT32 "
All ran great in XP's on c: ,D: and :e except that i was running out of room in all the partitions and the drive is getting very old , I think (5yrs). I used XXClone Pro v.0.58.0 to clone my old c: and d: partitions to a WD IDE 160GB. I tried many other cloning proggys like Acronis True Image, Drive Clone, Paragon Drive Copy, Drive Image 2002, HDClone 3.1 Pro but they all either changed my new drive NTFS file system to FAT32 or made exact same size copies. I formatted and partitioned my new drive as follows:..............
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Apr 5, 2007
I have successfully cloned my primary c partition of a dual boot system with XP Pro on the 1st primary partition c: and XP Pro on the 2nd primary partition as d: I can boot into my XP on the c: drive with no problem, but when I attempt to boot into my XP on the D drive it hangs on the blue screen right before booting into the user profiles. And believe it or not it continuously loops making the windows startup sound and the shutdown sound. It does the same in safe mode. I will try to explain the process on what I did so it can help you experts figure out this dilemma
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Jan 31, 2005
After an entire weekend working on this project, I am beat. I have a client who has a Windows NT Server and is replacing a 4 GB SCSI hard drive with a 20 GB IDE. System sees the new drive. I have used Ghost to create the clone of the original drive from the 4 GB SCSI to the 20 GB IDE. That worked fine. However, after removing the SCSI drive to boot from the 20 GB IDE, I repeatedly obtain the STOP: 0x0000007B INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. I have been in contact with Symantec and they have not been of much help. I have seen the article from Microsoft regarding the error as well but have not had much luck.
My question is by chance, has anyone else experienced a similiar situation and what has been your resolution? I would be extremely grateful to anyone who may have an answer to this problem.
Thank you for any help you may provide. I have not seen a similiar thread here on this forum of a clone from a SCSI to an IDE.
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Dec 3, 2006
I was doing a new installation of XP home on a new hard drive, XP formatted the drive as F: and installed the boot sector there because a thumb drive was in the usb port (which it recognized as C:). I wasn't paying that close of attention and I didn't realize XP would see that thumb drive as C:. My question: is there any way to change the boot letter back to C: without reformatting the hard drive?
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Jul 25, 2005
how can i change the drive letter of my boot volume
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Jun 23, 2010
I reformatted a crappy gate way which has a recovery partition, but it would not reformat the rigth way, when i went to set up windows, Push the next button, i big white box went over everything and that was that, i reformatted 3 times and it kept doing it, so i got a winxp pro disk and did it this way, everything works geat, but now, that damn partition is taking my drive letter C, and i have already read the thing from microsoft about regedit, i did it and i could not load windows, it froze after Loadined winxp, mouse moved but nothing happend, i reformatted again... still taking my drive letter.. please help, if i have to reformat one more time, i wish for it to be the last, and my drive letters to be right.. HELP!! THANKS
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Dec 19, 2004
I'm trying to install Windows XP on my new Serial ATA hard drive, it has been formatted everything seems ok, When I start installing windows XP pro on this machine it seems like it just can't detect the damn hard drive, when I set it as boot on te serial ata drive eeverything works fine, it goes as C:/ but I just can't switch to my cd drive with windows XP to install it.When I boot up my other hrd drive with windows xp, I can actually see my hard drive in windows explorer.
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Aug 3, 2005
My office has a number of mapped network drives for each user which, unfortunately, start at drive letter F.Each time a USB device is used on the computer it is also automatically assigned the drive letter F (presuming that C is hard disk and D and E are CD/DVD drives). This has to be manually changed from within Disk Management.Apparently this is as a result of physical drives taking precedent over the mapped network drives.Is there any workaround for this other than moving the mapped drive letters further along in the alphabet? - this is not really a feasible solution at this time.
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Jul 31, 2005
I had to reinstall XP because of spyware issues. I saved important data on my slave drive. I reinstalled XP. Now the bios, device manager, and disk manager recognizes the slave drive but didn't assign it a drive letter. In disk manager it shows as a basic disk, NTFS, Healthy (Active), 18.65 GB,Online. When I right click the volume to assign a drive letter it is grayed out.
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Nov 22, 2009
I have just bought and installed (to the point of completing initialization under Disk Management) a new 1 TB hard drive. Originally, I was planning to use it solely for data storage.However, I am thinking of installing Windows XP Pro and all the programs I currently use on it, thereby making it the new OS and programs drive, while using the original 120 GB HD as a data/backup drive.I think the main appeal of doing this, for me, is that it also presents an opportunity to reinstall Windows on a machine which hasn't had this done for more than three years, and which currently seems to take at least five minutes to boot to a "usable" state, despite having a reasonably high spec for its age (it was bought in 2001, but as a result of the upgrade
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Mar 31, 2010
I had voltage fluctuations last night due a snowstorm and the voltage dropped crashing my PC.It now won't boot and gives the error that a file is corrupted.Windows/system32/config..The PC runs an OEM XP home edition on a SATA drive, the PC also has an IDE drive (D) but the OSes are on the C drive.Inside the XP installation I have Linux Mint installed.When I boot I get the 2 options I always used to , XP (default) and Linux Mint.XP won't boot when selected and gives the error above.The Linux Mint, also on C and in fact installed as a program within XP, will boot, hence I believe the SATA drive to be undamaged.I can see the C drive and all the XP files from the Linux installation.I've tried using the original full CD and the recovery console but when the recovery console opens all it can see is the IDE drive which it labels D (and of course doesn't contain the original XP install.I can't remember how I got XP on the SATA drive in the first place, I don't appear to have any Hard drive drivers in the case I keep all software CDs in and I'm a bit flummoxed. I can only imagine I just fitted it and loaded the XP install disc but that's at odds with what seems to be happening now.Spent a large part of today Googling but can't find anything that will fix this. so far.I don't want to have to wipe and re-install everything unless there's no option, it's a fast way to kill a couple of days over the holidays.
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Jan 23, 2007
A laptop has 5 mapped drives which are only used on the office. Offline files is not an option. When a user on the road clicks on a mapped drive by mistake, the explorer window locks up while it tries to find it.
Instead of doing something sensible like taking the explorer window to C: drive or desktop, it goes to the next drive letter. Of course this is also unavailable. So the machine is essentially unusable for about 5 minutes if the user mis-clicks once.
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Feb 3, 2008
not being computer literate , i am having a problem with a new hard drive . i took out the old one . i have the windows disc and product codes , but i can't get it to boot to start the windows installation. i have done it on another computer , and the disc begins installing windows on start up. i have tried starting the computer with the disc in place , and without it . obviously , i must be missing something to get it started . the disc is brand new .
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May 18, 2007
I have a maxtor hard drive SATA 200GB as my main drive and a second drive D. Very recently when I have noticed that my computer took longer to boot into windows. Applications seem to take a bit longer than usual to load. I have XP SP2 installed. I defragment my drive every few weeks so its not a defragment problem however when I try to defrag it now, it takes many times longer to do so. Also for a scan disk of C: (chkdsk on boot) it took 6 hours to get to about 25%. So there must be a problem. I can hear the hard drive loading sound for a few seconds and then there is a very long pause maybe about 10-20 minutes. It should only take a few hours the last time i did it maybe about 5 hours. Something is wrong.
When I transfer a large file like 1gb into my drive D it takes 15 minutes. Which is a bit long for a SATA enabled hard drive. I have had this drive for about 2 years now and it has never gone this slow before. I have downloaded the seatools from the maxtor website which diagnoses the drive. The tool ran slow but my hard drive passed the tests. Also when I ran that scan disk, it did say there was a mirror copy of something and also some other things. I think it had the word security in it so it deleted somethings. It mentioned indexes and some files. I forgot most of it.
I have checked my D drive and it is running fine and unaffected. Also I noticed during bootup that on the windows logo screen, the one with the bar moving from left to right that it freezes for about 5 seconds somewhere near the end of its loading. Then my keyboard lights come on (recognises keyboard). Later after the logo disappears, the screen is black for about 1-2 minutes and the hard drive periodically stops loading then starts loading something. This also happens when the welcome blue background screen comes on which is making boot times slow. Also happens when I shut down. There are some periods of hard disk inactivity.
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Oct 31, 2007
my old boot drive was g: .. i followed this guide here and changed it to c:upon restarting .. the system doesn't load up .. it gets stuck on the Welcome screen and that's it .. am i screwed?
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Sep 30, 2008
I was attempting to back up my hard drive to an external hard drive. The program (Norton Ghost 14) wasn't recognizing the drive. The Norton tech. helped me determine this was because under Disk Management there were no drive letters next to the drives. It showed a small partition on my primary drive, my primary drive, and my usb connected external hard drive, but none had drive letters next to them. I attempted to change their drive letters. It did something, but the letters still didn't show next to the drives. After this, everything disappeared on my desktop. I then rebooted and couldn't get to the login screen.Right now, when I start my computer I get the Dell bios revision screen, then the black MS Windows XP screen, and then the blue XP screen. Everything looks normal except that it stops short of the login area. My guess is that by changing the primary drive letter that my computer now cannot find anything because it appears the C drive is missing.
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Jul 14, 2005
On our WinXP systems (SP1 & 2), when users attempt to us usb flash drives, sometimes the O/S tries to assign an already used network drive letter to the device, making it unaccessible. Of course, the non-admin users can't use drive manager to change the drive letter. Is their a way around this problem?
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Dec 7, 2005
Problem is after reinstalling xp on a new hard drive my second drive only shows up in disk management does not show up in my computer .It has all my stuff on it from my old drive so really need teh info on it badly.But under disc manmgement where it shows up healthy with no drive letter everything is blanked out except delete partition.
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Feb 19, 2009
Win XP Pro, USB 1.1 in front, 2.0 card added to PCI slot.I can put in a jump drive or a flash memory card reader and hear the XP bong, it does the new software found and says it's available, but It does not show on 'my computer'.I can go to manage, disk drives, and see it. I can right click and assign a drive letter, but still does not appear on 'my computer'.I can still open it after assigning a drive letter in 'manage' and read/write files from a new window.I'm suspecting BIOS? It was a machine I upgraded to XP Pro.
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Jan 6, 2009
I have an older Sony Viao desktop. Today I thought it would be a good idea to change the drive letters around in the Computer Managment utility that comes with Xp. So I have 3 physical drives, one of them is external, and I tryed to take the two Cd/dvd drives and move them to the bottom of my drive list by disableing them, then going to the Computer Management Utility, right clicking on my Local H drive, and selecting Change Drive Letter... Did that, then went back to the device manager, enabled my two cd/dvd roms, and everythign seemed to be in order... LOL! Until I restarted my computer. Now windows wont boot up. Wont boot from MY copy of Xp, and to top it off, the bios freezes as sson as I hit any key.
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Sep 14, 2005
I have an older Sony Viao desktop. Today I thought it would be a good idea to change the drive letters around in the Computer Managment utility that comes with Xp. So I have 3 physical drives, one of them is external, and I tryed to take the two Cd/dvd drives and move them to the bottom of my drive list by disableing them, then going to the Computer Management Utility, right clicking on my Local H drive, and selecting Change Drive Letter... Did that, then went back to the device manager, enabled my two cd/dvd roms, and everythign seemed to be in order..Now windows wont boot up. Wont boot from MY copy of Xp, and to top it off, the bios freezes as sson as I hit any key. So Im hoping someone can help me with this problem, because I have lots of important data on that machine that I need access to
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