Error 0x80090006 (tried to change boot drive letter)

  • Thread starter Thread starter Doug
  • Start date Start date
D

Doug

I got sick and tired of installing XP on machines that
came back with no C drive. Programs like Norton Antivirus
expect a C drive to install.

So I decided to change my boot drive in the registry
myself from "G" to "C" and I restarted.

Now i get "Error 0x80090006" because I didnt change the
registry in enough places. This is a "Windows Product
Activation" error and I cannot login to fix it.

I read on the support pages that the only thing I can do
is reinstall Windows. Seeing that I have over 10 GB of
legal applications (I am at a University with many volume
licenses for big apps like MS Visual Studio . . . I used
workarounds for not having a drive C for almost 2 years
and now I have lots of stuff I do NOT want to reinstall)
the LAST thing I want to do is re-install Windows.

This is even more upsetting than no C Drive!

Does anybody know what to do about either of these
problems:

1) XP installs on something other than the C drive
2) Windows Product Activation error prevents you from
fixing the registry.

Please, Please help!

--Doug
 
Changing the drive letter of the boot drive was difficult
enough in NT 4, became impossible in W2k, and then
semi-possible again in XP.
At the current state of your machine you could consider
hanging the drive onto a running XP as a slave, booting
into the XP of that other machine and using the registry
editing tools to load the hives of the now inconsistent
XP so that you can reverse the edits you made.
XP will install to other than C when there is already
and existing C during install - you might not have called
that existing partition C but by the rules for partition
lettering that NT has used since 3.x if it sees a lead
primary partition on the first disk it considers that C
even if the build that lives there believe it to be other
than C.
 
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