Vista Drive Letter Changed

[Colon Terminus]

I have a Triple-boot system running Windows 2000, Windows XP Professional
and Windows Vista Ultimate; all full retail versions. When I installed Vista
on the partition known as "F" to the other Operating Systems it chose, for
reasons known only to Microsoft, to assert itself as drive "C", bumping the
other drive letters up by 1.

I learned to really like Vista and for the last 8 months or so spend almost
100% of my time in Vista.

Recently I was running out of disk space so I decided to clone the HD onto a
larger drive. I used Acronis 2009 to do the clone, choosing "As Is" for the
partitions leaving the new extra space as unallocated so as to cause as few
problems as possible.

Windows 2000 came out just fine.
Windows XP took a little longer to boot up the first time but was otherwise
ok.
Windows Vista Ultimate booted up and showed me a "Preparing your Desktop"
screen for about 10 minutes and then asked for a reboot. Upon reboot it
thrashed the hard drive for about 2 hours then showed me a blank light-blue
screen. I did a Ctrl+Alt+Del, brought up Task Manager and started
Explorer.exe. This gave me a desktop with noting on it and a complaint that
it couldn't load my profile.

That's when I noticed that the Vista partition was no longer "C", but "F" as
it should have been in the first place!

How can I recover from this and get all my stuff back?

 

[Colon Terminus]

Yeah, Vista does that. It insists on booting from the C drive. I don't
know why, and don't really care.


No, it SHOULD have been C. That's what Vista wants.


Maybe booting your DVD and doing a "repair install" will fix it, but I
really don't know. I know I have recovered from several other bizarre
situations by doing this.

Good luck.

There is no such thing as a "Repair Install", at least I can't find such.
The Ripair procedure, booted from the DVD states that there is nothing ro
fix, everything is ok.

 

[PaulB]

I have seen this problem before. Take a look at this article (go down to the
section called Drive letter problems)

http://www.multibooters.co.uk/cloning.html

 

[Colon Terminus]

Hi Colon,

Just for info., this is a repair install - you need to be able to get
into Vista, so it won't help on this occasion

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/88236-repair-install-vista.html

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/101393-repair-vista-options-preferred-sequence.html

SIW2

Thanks for the link, now I know.
Unfortunately that won't work for me as you already pointed out.