Solved Drive letters now shown as * after using Partition Wizard

[Trapper]

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

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello mate, start with a look through the informaton at this link below, not sure it will help or not.

XP - Repair Install
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[gregrocker]

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.

 

[Trapper]

Well, strange things are happening

Firstly, thank you for your replies, your help is appreciated.

I am using an old PC to try things out, not my (This) main PC.
My old PC has 2 HDD's one with XP which was the first NTFS partition on drive 0 and was of course my C:\ drive.

After the problems with PW and the link from BFK I tried the install/repair option. After 2 hours the PC booted and all appeared to be okay. However after failing to get my network connections to work I did some digging and found that my original C:\ was now listed as drive F:\ and still NTFS. My PC is now booting from the second drive which is FAT32 on a very small partition and of course is now shown as C:\

I need to get drive F back as drive C and have C:\ as anything else! so I can then boot from the right drive & partition.

In Partition Magic, which was on my old machine, the second drive with the now C:\ partition is shown as 'BAD' with no status size or details.

In Windows Disk Management both HDD's are shown as healthy. I tried to see if changing the drive letters was possible, okay with changing the C:\ to T but I was not allowed to change my F to C.

I would prefer not to have to reinstall the whole lot so any suggestions gentlemen?

Also I have only 2 days to activate the repaired installation.

A little later...

I tried the suggestion by gregrocker and booted the PWCD, selected the drive and 'rebuild MBR' Then I unplugged the second HDD leaving only the HDD with my NTFS XP partition and two data partitions, The PC booted without a hitch but still shows as drive F. In Computer Management the drive is shown as Primary NTFS Healthy (System) Again I was not allowed to change the F back to C. I would like to format the second drive but do not want to replace it as this will then be the main boot drive!

 

[gregrocker]

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.

 

[Trapper]

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?

 

[gregrocker]

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.

 

[Trapper]

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

 

[gregrocker]

Let us know how it goes.