Active partition disappears

I recently installed Win7. I'm still mostly in XP, and the partition that has always been C: (first partition on disk 0) contains my boot files. When I select Windows 7 from the boot menu, it boots into my Win7 installation, which is located on the partition that has always been drive L:.

Windows 7 makes L: C:. In other words, when listing the drives in Explorer or Disk Management, the drive on which I installed Win7, which has always been L: in XP, now shows as C:. My original C: doesn't show in Explorer at all, and in Disk Management, it appears without a drive letter assigned to it.

In effect, Win7 has made a partition totally inaccessible.

Is there any solution?

You are experiencing one of the many issues that lead me to rail against dual-booting. Since virtualization became free and computers had the power and hardware support for it, dual-booting was declared a dead tech, at least to me. I never liked the fact you could render one or both OSes unusable.

If it was me, I'd back up my data completely, wipe the drive, and just install Windows 7 clean. If you still need XP for some unique reason, throw it in VirtualBox or install XP Mode.

After reading Magnuscreed's solution again, I'd give that a shot first. If it is as simple as assigning it a drive letter, my suggestion would be WAY overkill.

I'm embarrassed!

When I read your suggestion to assign the partition a drive letter, my initial reaction was that I'd already tried that. Since it had been a few weeks since I'd last worked on the problem, however, I decided not to rely on my memory. I booted into Win7 and found that there was absolutely no problem assigning it a drive letter.

My feeling is that I got frustrated when Win7 wouldn't let me change C: back to L:, and that I therefore never got around to trying assign a drive letter to the partition that had no drive letter.

Thanks very much to both of you, maguscreed and DeaconFrost!

I marked it as solved as soon as I posted my last reply.