Reassigning Windows Drive Letters

[Southrop]

Hay guise, my windows has decided to fuck up.

Yesterday, I was installing a free copy of Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2010 Special Edition (from giveawayoftheday.co m) and that was all fine. Until it got to the part about installing new drivers. I allowed them, and then for some reason, one of my partitions decided to reconfigure itself. It went from being drive S: to drive C:. I didn't notice this, although I did see an auto-play dialog box open up, which I thought was weird. I had just closed it without thinking.

Anyway, so after the installation, the installer tells me it needs to restart, so I do that. But then it won't start up because my OS is in my old C: drive, which became my D: drive! I found this through the startup version of Windows Restore, which told me that my largest partition (the old C:) is now D:, which came to me as a shock.

I've tried running system restore, that didn't work, so I decided to try running something from a Live CD. Right now, I'm running Ubuntu off my Live CD (hurr, live session) and I've tried running gparted. That allowed me to change the boot flag from my current C: drive (old S: drive) to my current D: drive (old C: drive), but that didn't fix anything.

Does anyone have any ideas? I've googled, but I've only gotten results that involve editing the boot.ini in Windows, which I can't start up as Windows doesn't boot and I wasn't given a recovery CD/the installation CD.

Imma run off to revise and then check this later~~

[Lupin]

Possible solutions
Solution 1:
You need an windows installer. Any flavor of the version you have will do (legit, cracked, etc).

Boot from CD and wait until setup completes loading. There's an option for "Recovery Console" Select that (press F2?) and wait for it to finish. You can then try fixing the boot record by using /fixboot

Solution 2:
Follow the instructions you've googled that suggests you to edit boot.ini.

You're already in ubuntu. Ubuntu can read/write on NTFS partitions.

[Duki3003]

So Windows is running, but now from (D:)
Theoretically you can try redoing it with Paragon Hard Disk manager again...
Now (I think) you have 2 boot records unless that as well is fucked up (1 on old (S:) which is telling to look for windows on (D:) and a correct one on (D:) which is no longer a primary boot disk). So I think it should work without problem when you restore it if at all possible.
Ultimately you'll have to repair your boot record running the recovery console if you manage to restore (C:).

Check bios as well, see boot disk priority etc. but I don't think Paragon would have messed with that...

But seriously how the hell did you manage to fuck that up so much o.O


But hell if it all fails - just install a fresh copy of Windows, or ditch it altogether and go Linux...

Edit: If you a have a legit Windows key you may download any ISO - it will work, and if you don't - well then you know...

[Lupin]

Are the partitions on separate drives? If they are, you can just disable/disconnect the offending drive. You can then follow the 1st solution I suggested to make the drive bootable again.

[Southrop]

No, they are the same drive. My computer has 1 300GB hard drive split into 4 partitions.

Anyway, I found a recovery CD ISO and downloaded that. Gonna try that.

And no, Duki, Windows still doesn't boot. I'm getting a MISSING BOOTMGR error at the moment, but Google tells me I can fix that using the Recovery CD.

[K7IA]

hmm, lets hope Paragon HDM didn't alter the registry as well during the drive letter changes.

A bootable cd with any tool that is able to alter the drive letters should do the trick imo.

good luck

[Mag-X]

If you can get Windows booting again, you can reassign drive letters in Computer Management. For XP, go to control panel > administrative tools > computer management. If you're using Vista or 7, just search for Computer Management in the start menu.

Click Storage > Disk Management. Right click the drive/partition you want to change, and click "Change drive letter and Paths..." If another drive already has the letter you want, you'll need to change it to something else first, so you may have to play musical chairs with them to get everything in order.

[K7IA]

^ you can not change the drive letter of a partition that is set as boot/system drive.

drive letters need to be change before windows boot. if possible the os should not even be let to run/boot before this change imo.

[Mag-X]

Shouldn't Windows automatically call it's boot drive C:\? I can't say I've ever seen it any other way.

[K7IA]

Shouldn't Windows automatically call it's boot drive C:\? I can't say I've ever seen it any other way.

I am sorry, may be I didn't understand your question. Practically any drive letter can be assigned as a boot drive.

[Mag-X]

Shouldn't Windows automatically call it's boot drive C:\? I can't say I've ever seen it any other way.

I am sorry, may be I didn't understand your question. Practically any drive letter can be assigned as a boot drive.

I'm saying as far as I've ever seen, Windows doesn't care what order the drives are actually in, and it will just assign whatever drive/partition it is assigned to as C:\. I could be totally wrong, but I can't say I've ever seen Windows call the drive it was installed to anything but C:\.

[Southrop]

So I've discovered that my boot drive is actually supposed to be S:. It's one of the silly things that Lenovo does with their computers. Boot stuff is in S:, Windows is installed in C:.

I'll do some more fiddling around when I get home. For now, Japanese exam D:

[Southrop]

I gave up and restored my computer to factory default settings. I've lost everything, but at least windows works :/

[Mag-X]

I gave up and restored my computer to factory default settings. I've lost everything, but at least windows works :/

That sucks. You couldn't have at least booted from a Linux live CD and copied your stuff onto an external drive before blowing it away?

[K7IA]

This incident gives you 100k experience points  Low level disk management tools are always dangerous 

[Southrop]

I gave up and restored my computer to factory default settings. I've lost everything, but at least windows works :/

That sucks. You couldn't have at least booted from a Linux live CD and copied your stuff onto an external drive before blowing it away?

Oh, I did. It'll just take ages for me to resetup my settings and stuff. I have my files, thankfully.