Disaster recovery: Restore to system drive other than C:?

[Donald Newcomb]

Bad news; the system drive on my Win2000 PC failed! Good news; I have a
fairly recent full NTBACKUP of that drive and an ERD and a replacement hard
drive. Problem; because it's a dual boot system, the system disk is not
named C:, rather it's G: For the life of me, I can't now figure out how to
force the Win2K repair/install to set up the disk as G: No matter what I do,
it comes up C:. Right now, I have all other drives disconnected (to prevent
any tragic mistakes). So it's just the one disk. Any suggestions are greatly
appreciated.

 

[Alphonse]

I'm not quite sure... memory fades... if you allow it to boot in safe mode
(no other drives and don't run any programs) and go to Computer Management
in Administrative Tools (or R-click on My Computer and Manage), You can
change the drive letter to G: It will complain because windows assumes all
programs were installed while the drive was C.

Bad news; the system drive on my Win2000 PC failed! Good news; I have a
fairly recent full NTBACKUP of that drive and an ERD and a replacement hard
drive. Problem; because it's a dual boot system, the system disk is not
named C:, rather it's G: For the life of me, I can't now figure out how to
force the Win2K repair/install to set up the disk as G: No matter what I do,
it comes up C:. Right now, I have all other drives disconnected (to prevent
any tragic mistakes). So it's just the one disk. Any suggestions are greatly
appreciated.

 

[Donald Newcomb]

I'm not quite sure... memory fades... if you allow it to boot in safe mode
(no other drives and don't run any programs) and go to Computer Management
in Administrative Tools (or R-click on My Computer and Manage), You can
change the drive letter to G: It will complain because windows assumes all
programs were installed while the drive was C.

My recollection of this is that it will work for any drive but the system
dirve. I had the replacement formatted as G: but when I tried to "repair"
Win2K, it got turned into C: and has not been G: since.

 

[Alphonse]

Donald,
Would you mind explaining the configuration you had, number of
drives/partitions incl CD drives and their corresponding drive assignments?

I am a bit confused about the following:
How did it become G in the first place? I suppose the NTBackup was done
while w2k was G? In your "old" system, when you booted to w2k, the boot
drive letter in Windows was actually G?
It was (is?) a dual boot system; what is the other OS?

I can't really play troubleshooting without knowing how many physical drives
you have, their partitions, and in which order they are physically
connected. Mind you that physical connection, as you well know, might have
nothing to do with drive assigned letters in Windows, so an explanation of
how they were and currently are is also essential. Since you are repalcing
a drive, I'd need to know how these drive have been "moved" around. If this
new drive was the third physical drive (secondary master), could you
recreate the physical config with dummy drives, such that tragic mistakes
would not be tragic?

As a final thought, have you actually completed the restore onto this drive
(while stand-alone, of course), and if so, have you reconnected everything
as it was and tried to boot the system? I believe that since the drive
letter is Windows assigned, then the info inside the backup should dictate
the drive letter once it is restored; in other words, let the restore
program think that what ever it's doing is correct (restoring to C) but that
upon booting, registry settings will read the old drive assignment and act
accordingly.

I'm not quite sure... memory fades... if you allow it to boot in safe mode
(no other drives and don't run any programs) and go to Computer Management
in Administrative Tools (or R-click on My Computer and Manage), You can
change the drive letter to G: It will complain because windows assumes all
programs were installed while the drive was C.

My recollection of this is that it will work for any drive but the system
dirve. I had the replacement formatted as G: but when I tried to "repair"
Win2K, it got turned into C: and has not been G: since.

 

[Donald Newcomb]

The configuration is a little odd. G: was the NTFS boot drive with Win2K. C:
D: & E: were FAT32 partitions on the old boot drive. C: still has Win95 ORS2
and can boot using a specially configured Win95 boot floppy.
G: Became the boot drive when I "demoted" the old drive to the second
controler and installed Win2K as a dual-boot. I could never set up the
system to actually dual-boot from the boot manager because I would have
configured the boot drive as FAT to do that. But I can dual boot using a
floppy. Anyway, the NTBACKUP was done of the G: boot drive and now I'm
trying to restore it back to a G: drive to return the system to the status
quo anti.

 

[Alphonse]

As a final thought, have you actually completed the restore onto this drive
(while stand-alone, of course), and if so, have you reconnected everything
as it was and tried to boot the system?

The configuration is a little odd. G: was the NTFS boot drive with Win2K. C:
D: & E: were FAT32 partitions on the old boot drive. C: still has Win95 ORS2
and can boot using a specially configured Win95 boot floppy.
G: Became the boot drive when I "demoted" the old drive to the second
controler and installed Win2K as a dual-boot. I could never set up the
system to actually dual-boot from the boot manager because I would have
configured the boot drive as FAT to do that. But I can dual boot using a
floppy. Anyway, the NTBACKUP was done of the G: boot drive and now I'm
trying to restore it back to a G: drive to return the system to the status
quo anti.

 

[Donald Newcomb]

No. Right now I'm on "hold". Western Digital is shipping me a new drive, so
I thought it best to wait for it. The spare drive I was going to relaod to
is an old (and very loud) Maxtor. I'd just have move the system over to the
new drive when it arrives. I was also looking to borrow a copy of
PartitionMagic, which I understand has the ability to reassign partition
letters.

 

[Donald Newcomb]

Things are progressing. Received new drive. Rebooted Win95 as first drive to
reset partitions to C:, D:, & E:. Moved that disk to second controller.
Installed new drive. Figured out that I needed to remove any partitions on
that drive. Win2K setup then allowed me to create a 20 GB partition which
it installed on as G:. Started Win2K with G: being system drive and C: D: &
E: being secondary. (F: is CD) Installed USB drive with backup files and
restored, but only newer files. Did not get restored to status quo ante.
Rerestored \repair directory. Ran emergency repair. Got blue screen of
death. Removed USB drive and tried again in manual mode checking only system
files. Still running in basic Win2K (did not restore system state). Now
restoring backup, this time all files. Will post progress.