Change drive letter 4 a partition that Vista marks as system wrong

[Jonathan Livni]

I'm trying to change a drive letter to a partition in Vista using Disk
Management. I don't have an OS installed on this partition (nither Vista nor
XP), but Vista insists its a system partition (in addition to C: which has
Vista on it as usual).

How can I convince Vista that I have no system on this partition?

If it helps - I did have XP installed before I installed Vista on a third,
unrelate partition, that I already deleted (deleted the whole partition with
XP on it).

 

[John Barnes]

The system partition has your boot files on it. It is the first hard drive
in boot priority and the active partition. You would have to make your
Vista drive match these criteria and then run the start-up repair. That
would make it so you could change your drive letter.

 

[Jonathan Livni]

- Both C: (where my Vista is) and the troublesome partition are marked with
"System" and "Active" in the Disk Management.
- I have no boot files on the troublesome partition (yes, I see hidden files
as well).
- What is the "start-up repair"? Is it still relevant after the two points
above?

 

[John Barnes]

You don't say whether the two partitions are on the same or different hard
drives. Are you using, or have you installed a 3rd party (Linux, System
Commander, etc) boot manager at some point. There are a number of ways you
could approach the problem, but the safest would be to copy anything you
have on the partition off, delete and recreate the partition and copy your
data back. Other options would would include using WinRE to see if fixing
the MBR or Boot records (on the partition you want to change) would help,
seeing if you can change the drive letter from WinRE and you could change
the letter that mount manager has in the registry or delete the entry and
let mount manager remount it on the next boot. While registry entries are
somewhat dangerous, if system restore is working and you do a restore point
beforehand, you can run system restore from the DVD in a worst case to
restore the prior registry. The active partition on Disk 0 should be the
only one Vista would mark as system under normal circumstances. Make sure
that is where your boot files are in any case. If you want to post back, it
would be helpful if you would supply the information for all your partitions
on the hard drives from the top panel and which disk and order they are on
from the lower panel. Good luck.

 

[Jonathan Livni]

Thanks John for the detailed answer. I did as you say, and deleted the
partition, and now I'm in trouble. But first...
Map:

==Disk 0==

C: - 60GB - Vista install
G: - 190GB - files...

==Disk 1==

unpartitioned - 10GB - for Linux scratch disk
V: - 10GB - Video Scratch (for video editing programs)
Z: - 230GB - My Documents (I need to change this to D: for some programs

to work)

==Disk 2==

S: - 10GB - Vista Swap (for the pagefile)
Unpartitioned - 50GB - for Linux installation - here I installed Win XP before!!!
D: - 190GB - files... - this is the problematic partition!!!

So I ran WinXP installation and deleted the D: partition. Now Vista won't
boot and I receive the following message: "BOOTMGR is missing"

HELP !

 

[John Barnes]

Using your Vista install DVD, go into the install process past the language
screen and the next screen has Install now. On this screen you should
choose the repair your computer (lower left) then on the next screen you
should run startup repair. Sometimes it has to be run more than once, up to
three times. If you have your MBR non standard due to installing Linux, it
may be necessary for you to repair it. If this is necessary, the WinXP disk
using the recovery console and fixmbr and fixboot would be the easiest
way to reset them to Windows standard. Then startup repair should work. It
would be preferable to do these tasks with disk 1 and disk 2 disconnected
initially. After you get Vista to boot, you can reconnect them. Also you
didn't indicate if you recreated and reformatted the D partition.
Also do you now have any other operating system on the computer. It appears
you have had Linux and XP and have some leftovers, but no OS.
Is that correct?

 

[Jonathan Livni]

John, problem isn't solved yet but thank you so much for your detailed
answers. It's great to talk to someone who understands what I'm talking about


Back to the problem - I never installed Linux on this machine (I plan to in
the future - the partitions I indicated for Linux are a provision). All the
OSs I installed on this machine are XP and Vista.
As you suggested I used Vista's startup repair, and it solved the "BootMGR
missing" problem. BUT it miracoulesly reincarnated the demi system partition.
So I'm back to the previous problem.
To clarify - Disk Management shows this (corresponding to the drive map in
the previous post)

==Disk 0==

C: - Boot, Active, Crash Dump, Logical Partition
G: - Primary Partition

==Disk 1==

V: - Primary Partition
Z: - Primary Partition

==Disk 2==

S: - Page File, Primary Partition
D: - System, Active, Primary Partition

Notice the problematic D: partition which I deleted, got recreated by
Vista's Startup Repair, and that has no system file whatsoever on. Also, for
some reason C: stoped showing "System" now.....

 

[John Barnes]

If the information you have here is complete, it pretty much explains you
situation. Windows installs the boot files (and makes the system drive) on
the first active primary partition, which in your case here is D. Since
your system lost the BootMgr when you deleted the D drive the files must be
there. A logical partition should not be marked active. Your cleanest bet
would be to mark the G partition as active and rerun startup repair to put
your boot files on that partition. That should make that your system
partition and you would then be able to rename your D drive.

 

[Jonathan Livni]

I did as you suggested, marked G: as Active, restarted, booted with Vista
install CD, ran the Startup Repair (I don't think it did anything), but the
problem remains - D: is still defined as System and Active.
A few questions:
- How is it possible for Vista to recognize two Active partitions?
- How come Vista shows the System on D: where in fact it is installed on C:?
- C: is marked as a logical drive AND as active. How is this possible?

Should I format all the drives and reinstall everything, or is there a way
out of this mess?
I started to search for a partition management program other than Vista's
"Disk Management" but found out that the latest versions of the most known
programs do not support yet Vista - (PartitionMagic 8", "Acronis Disk
Director 10")

 

[John Barnes]

Acronis Disk Director 10 (latest) and BootItNG both are fully Vista
compliant.
Since it won't take long, run Recovery console from your XP disk and do a
fixmbr That is where the active partition bit is set.
What drive actually has the Vista Boot File and bootmgr on it. Let's
see if we can backtrack.
Since you show no active partition on your Disk 1, set the first partition
active, then you could set it to be the first HDD in boot priority in the
BIOS, run startup repair and see if the boot files get put onto that
partition. I know in the past that it was necessary to have the first
partition on the first drive as a primary partition and since you have a
logical drive first, that may be causing your problem. It was often
suggested to put a small primary partition for the boot files in the first
position on the drive.
If that doesn't work, you may have to backup the Vista partition, change the
partition to primary and active and reload the system. It should not be
necessary to go beyond that.

 

[Jonathan Livni]

I finaly gave up, restarted, booted with Vista installation, deleted ALL the
partitions, rebooted again with Vista installation (just in case), and
created a single 65GB primary partition on Disk 0.

Then I clicked next, and got this horrible message:
"Windows requires a valid system volume for installation to continue. There
is enough space on disk 1 for a system volume to be created. Click 'OK' to
create the system volume and to continue installing Windows. Click 'Cancel'
to return to the previous screen."

So now I ask - why does Vista insist I have a system volume NOT on disk 0?
What's the problem of having 3 hard drives with a single partition on the
first one and installing there?

Does Vista really requires two partitions on two different hard drives?
(that just doesn't sound right)

Could this be a problem with how I connected the hard drives? They are all
exactly the same model SATA drives (wanted to RAID them in the past, not any
more). All without jumpers. I chose SATA ports so they will be Master 0,
Master 1 and Master 2. I don't see what could break the symmetry.

Finally, I rebooted with Vista Installation, deleted ALL partitions again,
and created the 65GB partition on Disk 1. Guess what - it didn't ask me to
create another partition. What's special about Disk 1 that does not apply to
Disk 0?!

 

[andy]

What motherboard do you have?
To which connectors are the SATA drives connected?
In bios setup, how are the drives listed in hard disk boot priority?
Be specific.