Changing Drive Letter of Active Partition

[debeast]

Hi all i've been along time lurker but this is my first post :

My question is this :

I recently ghosted my active partition on my old IDE drive

onto my new Raid Array(0) and wiped the original, but windows 2000 insists on calling the new active partition E: and i can't get it to call it C: which is what it needs to be for all my proggies to work.

I understand how win2k assigns drive letters with both raid and ide but how can i force it to use C: ?

I know this is a tricky one but there seems to be a very great store of geniuses here!!!!

I have a couple of ideas but not sure if they really work:

1) use Fdisk /mbr

2) use the KB article here http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...b;EN-US;Q223188 but i have heard bad things about this

thanks

Nathan

[Justice]

Never had to do this to the boot drive before, so I don't know if you can, but have you tried reassigning the letter via the drive manager applet?

[debeast]

I cant do this with the drive manager as it is the active drives i'm trying to change

Nice avatar btw

[fatboybubba]

Try using diskpart from either the resourcekit or the support tools, it will allow you to assign a drive letter to a volume.

-b

[/\/\o\/\/]

deBeast,

look out for Driveletters that are (still) in the registry,

could give you allot of troubles when renaming the drive.

%systemDrive% isn't used by alot of programs, so the driveletter is all over the registry

so normaly you should not try it.

gr /\/\o\/\/

[kennyb]

This should do the trick:

Start>Run>Regedit

Locate the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

Rename \DosDevices\E: to \DosDevices\C:

[gosh]

You shouldn't modify the boot partition. The registry hack mentioned is 100% unsupported by microsoft and if the registry hack doesn't work you're going to need to reinstall windows. From experience i would say the registry hack only works about 50% of the time. But it's your computer so do what you want.

-gosh

[kennyb]

You shouldn't modify the boot partition.  The registry hack mentioned is 100% unsupported by microsoft and if the registry hack doesn't work you're going to need to reinstall windows.  From experience i would say the registry hack only works about 50% of the time.  But it's your computer so do what you want.

-gosh

Actually, this is a supported method by Microsoft, but you have to know what you are doing. The standard caveat about modifying the registry applies. In, fact the link DEBeast has in his orginal post points to an MS Article describing this exact registry hack. I have used it many times after ghosting a partition.

This only works if your system was orginally installed as C: and somehow the drive letter got changed. This appears to be tha case for DeBeast and is why I suggested this solution.

This will cause major problems if your system installed as some drive letter other than C:.

[gosh]

That reghack is NOT supported by microsoft. Just because an article exists doesn't mean microsoft will help you if things go wrong. If you use that reghack and your system becomes unbootable and you call microsoft support, they'll only tell you to reinstall windows or to do a clean install.

And the article doesn't say it only works for drive c, you can use the article for any drive letter. Notice the article uses the terms boot partition and system partition. The BOOT partition will have the OS files such as ntoskrnl.exe, the SYSTEM partition will have the loader files, such as boot.ini and ntldr. It's very possible to have drive F be your boot partition and drive E be your system partition. Windows 2000 will often put the loader files (boot.ini, ntldr) on the same partition you install to.

No matter what the case is, the registry hack CAN make your system unbootable, even if you follow the article step by step.

-gosh

[MerlinTheWizard]

What's the program you used to clone your partition?

This is the main issue here. I bet if you had used the proper options, you wouldn't have ended up with and "E" drive...

[Marsden]

You can change any Drive letter except the Root or Boot install partition drive letter.