P
prognathous
Problem: I have three partitions on my first physical drive:
C: - Primary partition, installed with WinXP and used for emergency
cases
D: - Logical partition, contains all my data/documents
G: - Primary partition, also installed with WinXP. This is the
partition I regularly boot into.
Now, I decided to expand the size of D: by taking 30 unused gigs from
G:. For that, I used Partition Magic, but unfortunately Windows decided
to re-assign drive letters, and this made the startup process fail.
Right before the Login screen I got the following error: "There is no
disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive", followed by the
drive location. The Login screen itself never appeared after this
error.
Analysis: I still don't know why the resizing of partitions made
Windows re-assign those drive letter. What I do know is that it did.
This was obvious after I booted into the Recovery Console. I logged
into the non-functioning Windows XP installation on what was previously
drive G:, then typed the "map" command. This notified me that D: and G:
were now E: and M:
Solution: Here's what I did to re-assign those drive letter back to
their original state:
1. I physically disconnected the other two hard-drives and left only
the one with the three aforementioned partitions. Needless to say, I
had to turn the power off, and in this case I also had to take a jumper
out, thus switching the drive from Master to Standalone (Western
Digital drives don't function well otherwise)
2. I then booted into DOS and loaded Partition Magic. To force Windows
to reassign the last partition as G: rather than E:, I resized the
middle partition (D
, then added two other logical partitions right
after it. These were to function as dummy partitions, assigned as E:
and F: - the idea was to force the last partition to get the letter G:.
3. To initialize the re-assigning of letters, I ran the command
"fdisk /mbr". This was a tips I got from this site:
http://www.murraymoffatt.com/software-problem-0007.html
This command didn't kill the MBR boot code (as I always remembered it
does). Windows booted fine, and it reassigned the drive letters. C:, D:
and G: were now reinstated, but I also had two extra partitions I had
to get rid of.
4. I ran Partition Magic again, deleted both dummy partitions and
resized D: back into its full size.
All I had to do now is reconnect the other two physical drives and get
back to work. Hopefully this would help others (keyword: "for future
googlers").
Prog.
C: - Primary partition, installed with WinXP and used for emergency
cases
D: - Logical partition, contains all my data/documents
G: - Primary partition, also installed with WinXP. This is the
partition I regularly boot into.
Now, I decided to expand the size of D: by taking 30 unused gigs from
G:. For that, I used Partition Magic, but unfortunately Windows decided
to re-assign drive letters, and this made the startup process fail.
Right before the Login screen I got the following error: "There is no
disk in the drive. Please insert a disk into drive", followed by the
drive location. The Login screen itself never appeared after this
error.
Analysis: I still don't know why the resizing of partitions made
Windows re-assign those drive letter. What I do know is that it did.
This was obvious after I booted into the Recovery Console. I logged
into the non-functioning Windows XP installation on what was previously
drive G:, then typed the "map" command. This notified me that D: and G:
were now E: and M:
Solution: Here's what I did to re-assign those drive letter back to
their original state:
1. I physically disconnected the other two hard-drives and left only
the one with the three aforementioned partitions. Needless to say, I
had to turn the power off, and in this case I also had to take a jumper
out, thus switching the drive from Master to Standalone (Western
Digital drives don't function well otherwise)
2. I then booted into DOS and loaded Partition Magic. To force Windows
to reassign the last partition as G: rather than E:, I resized the
middle partition (D
, then added two other logical partitions rightafter it. These were to function as dummy partitions, assigned as E:
and F: - the idea was to force the last partition to get the letter G:.
3. To initialize the re-assigning of letters, I ran the command
"fdisk /mbr". This was a tips I got from this site:
http://www.murraymoffatt.com/software-problem-0007.html
This command didn't kill the MBR boot code (as I always remembered it
does). Windows booted fine, and it reassigned the drive letters. C:, D:
and G: were now reinstated, but I also had two extra partitions I had
to get rid of.
4. I ran Partition Magic again, deleted both dummy partitions and
resized D: back into its full size.
All I had to do now is reconnect the other two physical drives and get
back to work. Hopefully this would help others (keyword: "for future
googlers").
Prog.