Windows 7 Recovery Console says Win7's partition drive letter is diff.

Had one of the drive cables come loose while the system was powered up. On fixing the problem and powering the system back up I got the dreaded "Unable to Boot, insert System Disk" error. Booted up with my Windows 7 install cd, went into Recovery Console, and discovered the Console was saying that Disk 0 / Partition 0 is F:\ . Even though the auto repair didn't work I was able to use Bootrec /fixmbr and Bootrec /fixboot , but should I be worried that C: is F: in the Recovery Console? The drive is on SATA 1 (System calls them SATA 1 to SATA 4), so it's Disk 0, and Win 7 is on the first partition, so Partition 0, so by system logic that should be C:. O.o

And poking at the files on the harddrive the /fixboot and /fixmbr put the boot files (win7ldr, grldr, /boot folder, etc) onto the second partition (D:) which is Disk 0 / Partition 1. O.o Or should be...

Can you post a picture of disk management. That would help.

The Windows Recovery Console handles drive ID letters in a different way than Windows. See the screenshot for more information.

Notice that this only describes drive letters on this Windows installation used in this example. Your situation and drive letters in recovery console might be totally different but the principle is the same: it uses its own system, "restoring" your normal drive letters when closed and booted back to Windows.

This is totally normal behavior of the recovery console.

Kari

Your system is on C but the bootmgr ended up on D. You can just move/copy it to C.

Bootmgr - Move to C:\ with EasyBCD