*FIX* Wrong Drive Letters in Multi-Boot XP,Vista, W7

8253timer said:

FIX (with SavePart, tried other partition utilities and editing MountedDevices to no avail)

Hope this helps someone else with Wrong Drive Letter Problems

Installed WIN7 RC and all was well with XP Dual Boot.

After some experimenting(BSD,LINUX,etc), WIN7 would not boot, so popped in the DVD and let WIN7 repair the boot.

WIN7 now booted, but when booting XP on E: , it was now assigned the wrong Drive letter D: and would boot to just before the Logon Prompt and hang(same in safe mode.)

After much research and trial (including editing the HKLM/SYSTEM/MountedDevices hive of the XP install from within WIN7 to change the drive letter) this was the fix.

This particular XP boots from Partition/Drive E: in Windows.0 directory (yeah, i know, been this way for years)

FIX: (FREE!)
downloaded SavePart "AKA Partition Saving " Partition Saving

Boot from a FreeDOS Floppy or USB stick and run SavePart.exe

within SavePart Choose: (navigate with TAB key, Selected items turn BLACK)

Update Windows 2000/XP/Vista Registry
then
Choose element where boot configuration are stored (Disk number 0, in this case)
then
Choose element where boot configuration DATA are stored (Partition) where the XP(2000 or Vista) is located
then
Select the Directory where the XP (2000 or Vista) is located (Windows.0, in this case)

You then have access/ability to the change Drive Letters for that particular Windows Installation:

In this case:
Drive D (which needed to be E) and Drive E(which needed to be D)

Hi and welcome to sevenforums. really thorough first post. It probably would be seen more if it was in setup and installations. if you want some one can move it for you

Again welcome

Ken

Please, by all means, move the thread to where it would be most useful.

I don't have a problem with it but I see a similar situation...

Drive 320GB
(Partition #) 1: 239GB - XP
2: 58.5GB - Vista

Drive 120GB
Partition 3: 111GB - W7

Drive 500GB (backup)
Partition 4

In XP, it is setup as:
C: = 1
D: = 2
E: = 3
F: = DVD
M: = 4

In W7,
C: = 3
D: = 1
E: = 2
F: = DVD
G: = 4

In Vista,

C: = 2
D: = 1
E: = 3
F: = 4
G: = DVD

I am in the process of at least changing the 500GB drive so it is seen as M: in all OS, and I have named it 500bkup... now to name the rest so I know which is which while I am looking at it in W7...

In windows vista and in windows 7 the drive in which the system are situated are denoted as c: drive. But not in windows xp.

Thanks for the great fix. Had the drive letter problem before with XP and ended up reinstalling if I remember correctly.

This happened because I got a little careless. Was going to copy a drive to another and put it into the machine. Windows in it's infinite wisdom decided to swap the drive letters and made the second drive the C: drive and booted it from it. It made the real drive the E: drive and it was all downhill from there!

This fix worked great and no doubt saved me countless hours of holy hell!

There is now a free app to achieve this: FREE Rescue Kit Express | PARAGON Software Group - free partition software, hard disk partitioning