Need help fixing drive letters in XP

Factual Questions
1

Ok the OP got eaten so here it is again

Ok I’m running XP professional and 98 on a system of mine. At one point I had it partioned as follows

C-ME INSTALLATION
E-SHARED FILES
G-WINDOWS XP

(Don’t ask me how I got it to use those letters)

After various drive failures (IBM drives, don’t want to go into it) I now have just two drive installed (was 4)

Drive 1 has Windows 98 and is seen as C
Drive 2 has XP and is seen as D and E

Problem is I restored my backup (yes I actully had one) to D and most programs won’t run because they think they are not installed. I can’t install any programs because windows installer is looking on G for it’s files and G no longer exisits so I tried the following

Erased all partitons on the second drive

Made two partitions one 4 gb on the rest of the drive. I put the 4gb partition at the end of the drive, installed XP Professional and my backup software to the 4gb partiton, ran diskmagangement to format the 70gb partition at the beginning of the drive, named it G and restored

After the restore I edited the boot.ini on c to refrence the new installation of XP

I was able to choose it from the menu and almost boot but it hangs on the welcome screen before showing the user information so I did a repair install and that got me in

Problem is the drive still shows a D UNLESS I boot into the other installation of XP then in Device Manager it shows as G.

How do I either

  1. Fix it so D is again G
  2. Quickly edit the registery so all refrences to g: become d:
2

The Partition Magic software includes a “Drive Mapper” utility which will handle #2 above… but it’s not free :frowning:

I would imagine there are other free utilities to do this but I don’t know of them off-hand.

3

You can change drive letters easily in Windows 2000 and XP. I haven’t got an XP machine handy but in Win2k you right click “My Computer”, select “Manage”, then “Disk Management”. In Disk Management you can right click one of the partitions and select “Change drive letter and path”.

Hope that helps.

4

Disk Management does not let you change the letter of the boot and system drives.

5

One way to do a search and replace on the registry is to export the entire registry to a .reg file, edit it in notepad and do a search and replace for “G:”, then import that file back into the registry (backup registry first!). You may have to change some of your system environment variables as well under My Computer/Properties. I don’t recommend trying to get D back to G by creating 2 small partitions on the hard drive if XP is already booting with the system drive as D.

6

Ah, that’s right. What a silly restriction. It’s almost as if Microsoft doesn’t think we know what we’re doing. :wink:

Changing boot drives will indeed require some registry wizardry. This document should give you the general idea, I think.