I cloned XP from a near empty 120g drive to a 45g drive
and reformatted the 120g drive to use elsewhere. Now it
boots as drive E: and system management will not allow me
to change the drive letter even though C: is not in use.
Error is "windows cannot change drive letter of system
volume".

Any ideas how to fix this?

Cloning with XP is an akward issue

One needs to ensure that the source drive is other than 'C Drive' as Windows will attach a drive letter which cannot be altered once the target drive is identified as the Operating System disk. In your case the target drive has been labelled as E and when you boot of that disk Windows will not allow you to change it to C

The only way I have managed to 'Clone' is in fact a two step process

Create a Partition on your C Drive. Call it E or whatever drive letter you want
Use Ghost and create an Image of your C Drive on that Partitio
Again use Ghost and then 'Image' a new drive from the ghost image file on the partitioned drive
Disconnect the original C Drive and make the new Drive Primary Maste
Reboot the computer and Windows will now make the newly Imaged drive C and boot and run all the applications

I use this process every day in order to make effective Backup Solutions

Should a Hard Drive Fail, then the imaginging process from my Backup Image to a new hard drive takes less than 1/2 hour

Thus from a total disk failure to Operating PC is only a short time.

rsmith wrote:

> I cloned XP from a near empty 120g drive to a 45g drive
> and reformatted the 120g drive to use elsewhere. Now it
> boots as drive E: and system management will not allow me
> to change the drive letter even though C: is not in use.
> Error is "windows cannot change drive letter of system
> volume".
>
> Any ideas how to fix this?

I assume the old drive is still in place. If you remove it, then booting
your new disk might give you the "ntldr is missing" error. This is
because the boot loader files may not have been copied over to the new
disk. Your BIOS still looks to boot from your old disk.

The native Windows boot manager resides on the root of drive C: by
definition and this cannot be changed. Even though your old drive is
used for something else, the boot loader files are still there and the
BIOS looks there to boot an OS. The boot.ini file now points to your
second hard disk, instead of the first as before, and that partition
needs a different letter.

If you want to change this, copy the boot loader files (ntldr,
ntdetect.com, and boot.ini) from the first disk to the other partition
on the other drive and then use your BIOS to select your boot device.

Your boot.ini should read like:

[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect

unless your partition is an upgrade from 2K, where "WINDOWS" would be
"WINNT".

--
Kent W. England, Microsoft MVP for Windows Security