One Drive - Two Letters

[Guest]

From the Knowledge Base I learned it's possible to reassign drive letters,
including the Boot drive, by editing the Registry. No problems so far. The
problem I do have is Win XPProSP2 has decided to assign two drive leters (C &
H) to one drive (@%) GB SATA Boot drive). Quite often, I save something and
Windows says it's saving to the H drive even tho' the nominal C drive is the
boot drive. I made the SATA the boot drive through BIOS.
Suggestions?

 

[John John]

What did you do before this started? Did you edit the registry and
reassign drive letters?

How many hard disks do you have in the computer? How many partitions do
you have on these hard disks? How many operating systems have you got
installed on these hard disks?

John

 

[Guest]

I have three hard drives with four partitions. The former "C" drive (80GB)
was having serious sector faults so I cloned it to a SATA (250GB) drive. The
other HD (160 GB) has two 80GB paritions. Only WinXPProSP2 is runing and the
PC is booting from the SATA (assigned "C" in registry). The old boot drive
was reassigned to "J".

 

[Andy]

From the Knowledge Base I learned it's possible to reassign drive letters,
including the Boot drive, by editing the Registry. No problems so far. The
problem I do have is Win XPProSP2 has decided to assign two drive leters (C &
H) to one drive (@%) GB SATA Boot drive). Quite often, I save something and
Windows says it's saving to the H drive even tho' the nominal C drive is the
boot drive. I made the SATA the boot drive through BIOS.
Suggestions?

If you want to get rid of H:, run regedit, and under MountedDevices,
delete \DosDevices\H:.
Before doing this, run Disk Management and verify that the Boot,
System, and Paging partitions are all on the 250GB SATA drive.

 

[John John]

You cloned the old 80 GB drive to the new 250 GB SATA drive. Then you
made the 250GB SATA the Windows Boot drive. When you booted this 250GB
drive, the first time you booted it, was the old 80GB drive still in
place, did you disable or disconnect the old 80GB drive before you
booted the new drive?

Is the old 80GB disk still in the computer? Does your computer have a
floppy diskette drive?

John

 

[Guest]

No to disabled, just reassigned.
Yes to in the PC - Reassigned to "J"
Yes to floppy disc. The Sneaker net is still safer and faster that 802.11x.

 

[John John]

Your problem can be easily resolved in one of two ways.

1- Boot the computer with a Windows 98 boot diskette and issue the
FDISK /MBR command on both the old 80GB IDE and the new 250GB SATA hard
disks. Then, as an added precaution, disconnect (or disable in the
BIOS) all but the 250GB SATA disk and boot the computer to the new
Windows XP installation on the SATA disk. Issuing the FDISK /MBR
command on the disks will rewrite the disk signatures and the
information for these disks in the Mount Manager's MountedDevices
database will become invalid, the drive letters will have to be
reassigned. When the computer is booted the I/O Manager will reassign
drive letters based on a set of predetermined rules, one of these rules
being that the first active partition will be issued drive letter C:.
The first active partition is usually the one used to boot the Windows
installation but when both IDE and SATA disks are present the IDE disks
may be enumerated before the SATA disks, disconnecting or disabling all
but the 250GB SATA disk will eliminate any possibilities of the active
partitions on IDE disks obtaining drive letters before the SATA disk.
After the first reboot (with the SATA disk only) you can shutdown the
machine and reconnect or enable the other disks again and reboot the
computer, the other disks will be reassigned other drive letters, these
letters on the non-system/non-boot drives can then be changed by the
usual methods if you want.

2- Go in the registry and delete *all* the entries in the
MoundedDevices key, do not delete the key itself! The information in
this key is also known as the Mount Manager's database. Then, as in the
first method above, disconnect or disable all but the SATA disk and
reboot the computer. Without any information in the Mount Manager's
database all disks will be treated as new disks and, as stated earlier,
the I/O Manager will reassign drive letters based on a set of
predetermined rules, one of these rules being that floppy drives will be
assigned letters starting at letter "A:" and another rule being that the
first active partition will be issued drive letter C:. As mentioned
earlier, after the first reboot you can bring the other hard disks online.

Either of these methods should fix your drive letter problems. I would
opt to delete all the information in the Mount Manager's database, it
will cleanup the key of any invalid entries and in my opinion it is
faster and easier than using the fdisk /mbr method. If you are unsure
or wary about registry editing then use the fdisk /mbr method, the end
results will be the same. While using the fdisk /mbr method may leave
some invalid or orphaned entries (clutter) in the MountedDevices key
please note that these unused entries will in no way whatsoever affect
the newly assigned drive lettering, the Mount Manager will ignore the
invalid entries.

John