Drive letters now shown as * after using Partition Wizard

I have recently downloaded Partition Wizard, but now have the following problem and I hope you are able to assist me!

I have used a bootable iso CD of Partition Wizard.

I booted into Partition Wizard from this CD.

I needed to delete an old Win 98SE drive and incorporate the resulting drive space as a part of my WinXP drive. I have formatted the Win98SE partition then deleted this partition so it was then unallocated. I then re-sized my C:\ drive to incorporate this unallocated space.

After this was done I rebooted into Windows XP, I saw the normal black Windows XP screen with the travelling lights, after this the two tone blue screen appeared showing Windows XP Logo. At this point the system would not load any further.

I rebooted into PW and noted that all the partitions had no letters, only an * followed by the label, what should be C:\ Windows XP was now *Windows XP

Other partitions are now * Drive 2, * Drive 3, etc.

What can I do, if anything to correct this problem.

Many thanks

This is common with PW CD which will not show drive letters.

With XP you can lose bootability when resizing on the boot sector. Make sure XP partition is still marked Active in PW CD, then click on the HD to highlight it and from Disk tab run "Rebuild MBR."

If this doesn't start it, boot into XP CD Repair console to run bootrec /fixmbr and bootrec /fixboot. If these fail you will need to proceed with the XP CD as if to install and then once it discovers the XP installation choose the "Repair" option.

You must have installed XP from another partition which was already holding C. It's letter cannot be changed without reinstall.

If you want to format the other HD and XP will not start with it connected, boot the PW CD to wipe it from the Disk tab.

Make sure XP partition is marked Active as well as System.

I thought afterwards that I could use PWCD to boot and format the drive!

Before the repair install the NTFS XP partition was the C drive, how this happened is strange, the second drive had a copy of an old 98se partition. I can only assume that the repair went onto that copy and not the actual XP partition, only guessing though!

If I left it as F would that make life difficult later?

Having another drive letter on Win7 is not much of a problem, but some XP era programs will point only to C. However I would run for awhile to see because this may not affect you.

You can also create a C data partition for programs which only want to write to C.

If there could be problems later then I will re-install a clean copy and start again, a lot of the programs are either defunct or just past it and I can then clear out the rubbish at the same time

Many thanks and best wishes.

Trapper

Let us know how it goes.