XP drive letter assignment

[Kim Aku]

I seem to remember there was a trick which would force XP
to re-assign default drive letters (i.e. 1st boot
partition "C:", next "D:" and so on.)

I need to do this because I copied my XP Pro boot
partition with Partition Magic on to an already formatted
drive and then discarded the old disk. From the copied
partition, XP boots OK up to log-in, but then hangs, I
think because it expects the drive to be called "C:", but
somehow after copying the partition but before discarding
the old disk, XP assigned "D:" to the new boot partition I
had just copied, so I need to make blank the boot or
partition info that causes the boot copy of XP pro to
find "D:" instead of the "C:" it expects.

 

[Hans-Georg Michna]

I seem to remember there was a trick which would force XP
to re-assign default drive letters (i.e. 1st boot
partition "C:", next "D:" and so on.)

I need to do this because I copied my XP Pro boot
partition with Partition Magic on to an already formatted
drive and then discarded the old disk. From the copied
partition, XP boots OK up to log-in, but then hangs, I
think because it expects the drive to be called "C:", but
somehow after copying the partition but before discarding
the old disk, XP assigned "D:" to the new boot partition I
had just copied, so I need to make blank the boot or
partition info that causes the boot copy of XP pro to
find "D:" instead of the "C:" it expects.

Kim,

can you boot in safe mode? If yes, check
http://www.michna.com/kb/WxDriveLetterChangeSystemPartition.htm
for further details.

If not, things are more complicated. You would have to access
the hard disk somehow and make the registry change, for example
by putting it into a different computer, loading the registry
hive into REGEDT32.EXE and changing it there. This is not for
the faint-hearted, but if you have nothing to lose ...

Hans-Georg