wrong drive letter

[philo]

If you read again you will see that I told the user to use a *Windows
98* startup floppy and use the fdisk /mbr command, this command rewrites
or zeros out the 4 byte long disk signature from offsets 1B8h through
1BBh. These are 4 of the famous 6 bytes that fdisk /mbr rewrites, it
rewrites the 4 byte disk signature at bytes 440 to 443 along with the
two bytes 444 & 445. Rewriting the disk signatures invalidates the
Mount Manager's database and allows or causes it to reassign drive
letters. The Windows 2000/XP fixmbr command does not rewrite these
bytes, it rewrites the first 440 byte and doesn't touch the disk
signature, fdisk /mbr rewrites the first 446 bytes and zeros out the
signature.



No, the reason it didn't work is because fixmbr doesn't rewrite the disk
signature so when he rebooted the installation the disk and partitions
were unchanged and the Mount Manager did as it always does, it respected
the drive letter assignment in its database.




And that is exactly what would have happened if he would have edited the
registry or if he would have used fdisk/ mbr. The reason the clone
didn't get assigned drive letter C: is because the Mount Manager saw the
old parent drive with the same disk and partition signature and it
respected its previously assigned C: letter so in turn this letter was
no longer available for the clone, so the Mount Manager does what it
always does, it assigned the next available letter to the clone.



Yes, it would have addressed the issue of the wrong drive letter being
assigned to the clone. As I said earlier, he could have removed *all*
the entries in the MountedDevices key and Windows would have booted
properly and reassigned drive letters following its preset rules.

And big deal with being "imprudent", if it would have failed there would
have been little lost as the clone was already unbootable, the user
could have then redone the cloning job if he failed with fdisk or the
registry edit. The point is that this is a *very* well known issue with
disk cloning and it is almost never necessary to go through the whole
process of recloning the drive just to fix this lettering problem.

John

Even though I said I would have no further comments here...
I wanted to *thank* you for clarifying the difference between running fdisk
/mbr from a win98 floppy

vs running fixmbr from disk management.

I did not know that there was a difference...
so I learned something today!


If I mis-spoke I apologize for doing so.

 

[Larry]

I used Ghost to copy the old hard drive to a new, larger hard drive in this
XP computer.

At first, it would not start beyond the startup screen. So, I did a repair
reinstall of the OS. All seemed fine, but...

the disk shows as D: and not as C:. It is the only hard drive in the
system. That is a problem as stuff, like windows update, won't.

How to get it back to being C:?

Thx.