Drive letter nightmares

  • Thread starter Thread starter C J.
  • Start date Start date
C

C J.

I have two internal harddrives using NFTS file system, split into five
volumes. PC was working great, until the other night when attempting to
shut down the pc... it wouldn't it would just hang. This afternoon - after
getting tired of this $^#% - I booted from a XP Install CD and selected R
for repair. When I was asked which install of windows I wanted to repair it
was displaying 1.D:\Windows. It should be C:\windows.

Using Map I looked at all the drive letters on the PC.
I know my C: Bootdrive should be 104 GBs C is being reported as G, and D: is
only 15.6 GB in size.

The order of the drives was: A,B FLoppy disks
C: D: E: [harddisk 0/Parts 1 -3], CD drive F:, DVD G:, H: and I: are
harddisk 1/ part 1 -2 . (slaved)

Its like everything is back to front.
 
Try not to mix up the terminology. You have two physical drives. One has
two partitions on it and the other has three partitions on it. Drive
letters are assigned to the partitions, not to the physical drives. This is
done in some specific way that may vary from one brand of BIOS to another.
C: drive is typically the active partition on the first hard drive in the
boot order which actually has an active partition. So if the first hard
drive in the boot order does not have an active partition, then C: could be
assigned to the active partition on the second drive. I don't know which
letters would be assigned to which of the rest of the partitions. In the
bios, you can typically change the order in which the physical drives are
checked for whether they have an active partition to boot from. So in the
bios, find the option for changing bootup order, and put the physical drive
you want to boot from ahead of the drive you don't want to boot from. Be
sure to save on exit from the BIOS setup window. Hopefully these drives
have a physical capacity or brand difference so you can tell which one you
actually want to boot from. When you boot up, the partition which is
assigned the letter C: should be the partion on which you originally
installed Windows, and perhaps all will be well. Let us know how it goes.

-Paul Randall
 
C J. said:
I have two internal harddrives using NFTS file system, split into five
volumes. PC was working great, until the other night when attempting to
shut down the pc... it wouldn't it would just hang. This afternoon - after
getting tired of this $^#% - I booted from a XP Install CD and selected R
for repair. When I was asked which install of windows I wanted to repair
it was displaying 1.D:\Windows. It should be C:\windows.

Using Map I looked at all the drive letters on the PC.
I know my C: Bootdrive should be 104 GBs C is being reported as G, and D:
is only 15.6 GB in size.

The order of the drives was: A,B FLoppy disks
C: D: E: [harddisk 0/Parts 1 -3], CD drive F:, DVD G:, H: and I: are
harddisk 1/ part 1 -2 . (slaved)

Its like everything is back to front.
Click to expand...

Click Start / Run / diskmgmt.msc{Enter}. You can now
right-click the various drives and re-assign their drive letters.
It may be necessary to reboot the machine a few times until
every letter is in place.

Post again if your system drive letter is incorrect. There are
ways to fix this too. If you do, make sure to post an exact
map of your current and your desired configuration, e.g.
like so:

Current Configuration
==============
Drive C: Label=System Size=100 GBytes
Drive D: Label=Data Size=50 GBytes
etc.
 
Hi Pegasus...

I think I may have been a bit premature believing there was a problem with
drive letters. After setting chkdsk/ f from a command line, I powered down
the system for awhile, and then restarted after a few hours. chkdisk fixed
some empty entries:

Event Type: Information
Event Source: Winlogon
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1001
Date: 9/1/2007
Time: 7:01:42 PM
User: N/A
Computer: SELF-2FXXXXXX94
Description:
Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is DSK1_VOL1.


A disk check has been scheduled.
Windows will now check the disk.
Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Cleaning up 21 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 21 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 21 unused security descriptors.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
Usn Journal verification completed.

109997020 KB total disk space.
13661452 KB in 45128 files.
14284 KB in 3904 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
239584 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
96081700 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
27499255 total allocation units on disk.
24020425 allocation units available on disk.

Internal Info:
a0 07 01 00 94 bf 00 00 4e f8 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........N.......
8f 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 f2 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
aa 38 df 01 00 00 00 00 ac 12 19 14 00 00 00 00 .8..............
7c 82 4a 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |.J.............
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 8e 5d c5 26 00 00 00 00 .........].&....
99 9e 36 00 00 00 00 00 c8 3c 07 00 48 b0 00 00 ..6......<..H...
00 00 00 00 00 30 d4 41 03 00 00 00 40 0f 00 00 .....0.A....@...

Windows has finished checking your disk.
Please wait while your computer restarts.


Disk manager now once again displays the proper drive partition information.

Another thing I did was invoke msconfig, and I took a look at whats going on
in Boot.ini
what I saw was:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\Windows="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect.

Use edit I swapped the delimited items around, and this seems to have fixed
a couple of problems. I'm at a loss to explain how the /noexecute and
/fastdetect items got swapped.
C J. said:
I have two internal harddrives using NFTS file system, split into
five volumes. PC was working great, until the other night when
attempting to shut down the pc... it wouldn't it would just hang. This
afternoon - after getting tired of this $^#% - I booted from a
XP Install CD and selected R for repair. When I was asked which
install of windows I wanted to repair it was displaying
1.D:\Windows. It should be C:\windows. Using Map I looked at all the
drive letters on the PC.
I know my C: Bootdrive should be 104 GBs C is being reported as G,
and D: is only 15.6 GB in size.

The order of the drives was: A,B FLoppy disks
C: D: E: [harddisk 0/Parts 1 -3], CD drive F:, DVD G:, H: and I: are
harddisk 1/ part 1 -2 . (slaved)

Its like everything is back to front.
Click to expand...

Click Start / Run / diskmgmt.msc{Enter}. You can now
right-click the various drives and re-assign their drive letters.
It may be necessary to reboot the machine a few times until
every letter is in place.

Post again if your system drive letter is incorrect. There are
ways to fix this too. If you do, make sure to post an exact
map of your current and your desired configuration, e.g.
like so:

Current Configuration
==============
Drive C: Label=System Size=100 GBytes
Drive D: Label=Data Size=50 GBytes
etc.
Click to expand...
 
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