Changed Boot Drive Letter And Now PC Won't Boot - Installed New Hard Drive
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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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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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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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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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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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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Sep 2, 2009
I did a new hard drive install. When the new HD was complete I thought I would copy the data from the old drive to the new.They both still had os installed They were both connected to the system at the same time.When I finished, I removed the old drive. The new drive wouldn't boot. "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter". After recovery disk completed, the system booted fine. I could reboot from the shutdown option.
The problem I have is when the system is shutdown completely. It requires the system disk again. It will reboot after the system disk is reinstalled. I continually get the "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter" error message.During bootup after a shutdown, I can F2 into the bios before the error message. It will allow me to exit and then windows will boot without the error message.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Sep 13, 2009
I just bought a WD 1 TB to replace 120 GB slave (it was 'c:') I had. I intended to still use it as a slave and keep my 320 GB (it was 'd:') as the master. They're both SATA's so of course that doesn't matter so I just kept the 320 set as the primary in BIOS.At first boot up the computer started fine but when it started Windows the previous devices hadn't been loaded and I was asked to register again before starting. I re-registered and clearly all the previous settings are gone
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May 24, 2010
I have 2 drives, one with Windows and such, and the other with about 1,000 games that my girlfriend plays. She let her grandson on, unsupervised, and the next thing is a trashed system drive. Unfortunately, there was no way to save it, so I did a format and clean reinstall of XP Home. Goback was on the drive, and there was no way to uninstall it before the reinstall. The reinstall went fine, but the GAME drive is virtually inaccessible. It doesn't show in My Computer, but does show in Admin Tools, Disk Management. However, the drive name is shown as F(F. It should either be D: or F: ( there are 2 optical drives). I can't change the name or drive letter. I get the error "the drive is locked".
I tried Partition Magic, and it will change the info, temporarily. Also, PM shows the drive as *.F It doesn't give any error message, and says the change has been applied, but it obviously hasn't. I searched this forum for "hard drive locked" and followed suggestions that I had not tried previously. The smiley replaced a colon; the entry should read F(F. Sometimes I think I might know what I'm doing, and then I realize, maybe not.
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Sep 19, 2007
I have an old HD From a system that I got rid of. I want to put it into a friends system to see if I can retrieve the files off of it and put it onto my external HD. The hard drive was the boot disk and the computer I am installing it on has it's own boot disk. If I boot up with two boot disks will there be a problem? Is there anything I need to take into account before doing this? I am planning on installing the old HD onto an ATA cable that I unplugged from the DVD drive. The HD that is in this system is not on an ATA cable, I'm not sure what it is connected to, just a small plug with a blue cable going to the mother board.
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Sep 18, 2006
A friend of mine's computer has three hard drives. The one designated as her C drive is an 8gb thing. She has a 40gb drive along with another 30gb one. In her cmos setup I couldn't get it to boot with a drive besides that which was designated C So can I just copy and paste all the stuff in her C drive into another drive but how would I get windows to boot off of that drive instead??? She has XP home
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Sep 7, 2007
I just bought a new hard drive today (120 GB Fujistsu) for my laptop computer. I installed it, and I am now trying to boot Windows XP onto it with the CD-ROM. But for some reason, the CD is not booting up and my computer keeps saying "Operating System Not Found." I tried changing the boot order from the hard drive to the CD-Drive, but that didn't help either.
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Sep 26, 2005
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Feb 15, 2005
On my first attempt to boot, the hard drive is not detecte On the second attempt, the bios always sees the hard drive and boot up is normal.I have tested the Seagate hard drive with the Seagate hard drive support tool and all is error free.This is consistent. I can't find anything in the bios where this would be switchable.
Boot up order is:1. DVD drive 2. Floppy drive 3. Hard drive Sony Vaio PCV-RZ22G.Windows XP Home. P4-2.4 1 gig ram.
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Nov 28, 2006
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Sep 17, 2007
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