Windows 7 - Save drive letter assignment?

Hi there,

I installed Windows 7 to test it on my PC (I still use XP for most purposes). Now I want to reinstall it because I want to try a different version. Unfortunately, I would have to re-assign all drives again and I have a lot of them.

So my question is this: Is there any way to save the current assignment and restore it when I have reinstalled Windows?

TIA
SoWhy

I got access to MSDNAA through my university account. Not that that's relevant to this question ;-)

The easiest way might be to open Regedit, navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices folder, make sure the MountedDevices folder is highlighted on the left, then do File->Export and save the registry keys somewhere. It should save as a .reg file. Upon reinstallation, just double click on the file and it should import them back to restore the settings.

Make SURE after you export the keys to verify that they were all saved and reflect what is currently in the registry by right clicking on the saved .reg file and opening in notepad/wordpad.

I believe this should work.

For reference, check out Option Two below:
Drive Letter - Add, Change, or Remove in Windows 7

Post a screenshot of your Disk Management screen. What are all these drives that you'd have connected? Are they local hard drives? If so, disconnect them until your Windows 7 install is complete. If they are network drives, it can be done with a batch file. I'm hoping it isn't the case, but I've seen this asked before, and it was mainly due to the user over-partitioning the crap out of their drives.

Unfortunately, that latter scenario is probably the case. My partition table has been the same for more than 10 years now and while I could nowadays use less partitions, most of my programs and settings are configured to this partitioning now, so changing it to less partitions would be even more work than having to re-assign all those letters xD

Then I'm not sure my suggestion would work well, if at all.

As they say, pay now or pay later.

I'm not sure what that would mean, unless you are writing your own apps for your own usage. On a new install, when you reinstall your apps, you could put them in the default directories. You'd be reinstalling all of those apps anyway.