windows 7 drive letters messed up, cat

[loinyui]

hi guys i have a very, very frustrating problem.

until recently I had a ubuntu/win7 dual boot. i got a laptop with ubuntu so i decided to remove it from my pc. after that i had tremendous problems as grub decided to delete my partition table. anyway i got that fixed.

so i have 3 hdd's in my pc. 1x 500gb sata, 1x 500gb ide & 1x 1tb sata. i did a fresh install after my boot problem, everything was fine again until today. i installed windows on drive c: on my 500gb sata hdd. the 1tb sata is for data, the ide will be used as a network hdd.

so as i turned on my pc today, it didnt boot and just showed a prompt. so i booted from another drive. to my surprise i got a grub command line despite me uninstalling it and doing a fresh install.
anyway i booted into the recovery dvd, did startup repair without sucess. so i looked around cmd to find that now my windows partition got assigned the drive letter d:

i dont know if i recall correctly but i think my teacher said that win7 can only boot from c:. so i think that this is basically my problem.

how do i get drive d: to show up as c: again? please npte that i CANNOT boot into windows

 

[Maguscreed]

Win 7 can boot from any drive letter, it's actually meaningless.
Windows only sees it as a device number and partition number i.e.
drive 0 partition 1
It doesn't even see the drive letter in the bootmgr.
It sounds to me like the real problem here is grub. I know from personal experience it can be nearly impossible to get rid of.
You could just try a startup repair.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/681-startup-repair.html

 

[loinyui]

as i said, i already did a startup repair, it told me that it found errors and that after a restart it will continue repairing my pc. but when it finished and my pc rebooted, it was still the same problem: either i only get a prompt or the grub prompt.

edit: ok i got to the point at which startup repair doesnt detect any problems, however i still cannot boot. it still shows me only prompts.

 

[Maguscreed]

You need to remove grub this isn't a windows problem.
fdisk/mbr

should check it, but that was with older versions of grub.
Believe me you aren't the first person to come by here with a grub that absolutely refuses to uninstall.

 

[loinyui]

sorry i dont have fdisk at hand, is there any equivalent which comes with windows 7?

 

[Maguscreed]

I'll defer to a member with more experience on the subject.
See here, this may be of more use to you than me.
http://www.sevenforums.com/backup-restore/62209-remove-grub-restore-windows-7-a.html

 

[gregrocker]

GRUB has code corrupting the boot sector.

You need to wipe the HD of all code before reinstalling Win7:
SSD - HDD Optimize for Windows Reinstallation

Then follow the steps to get a Perfect Reinstall in my signature picture below.

It's best to unplug all other HD's during install, plug Win7 into first SATA port, make sure no non-OS partiitons are marked Active to later interfere.

 

[loinyui]

hi guys, thanks for all your help! i did a fresh install yesterday, i made a backup of all my files on all my drives on an external hdd. after that i formatted every hdd in my system and reinstalled windows. my pc has yet to fail me as everything seems to be working, even after i copied my backup files to my hdd again. but i will keep the hdd optimization in mind, you never know when this will happen again

 

[gregrocker]

GRUB code can corrupt Win7 even when no longer on the drive. This is why wiping the HD of all code using Diskpart is recommended.

If performance is good, let it ride and see how it goes. If you reinstall take advantage of the steps to get a Perfect Reinstall in my signature picture below.