Drives all mess up

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June 24th, 2005, 08:15 AM
niteghost

Drives all mess up

Reformatted my Primary Partition C:/ and install XP Pro. and it well well , except some issues with some of the Drivers NOT installed. Instead of locating the drivers from the Manufacturer website, "silly " me, I thought Xp Prof. was NOT installed "right ". So, I did another Reformat and Reinstalled and the result is " Disastorous "
Now my Drives are all mess up: C:/ >> F:/ ( Primary Partition )
D:/ >> C:/ ( Second Partition )
E: >> D: ( DVD -RW Drive )
F: >> E ( CD Drive )

How do I reassign my Drives back to Default, without Reinstalling XP.

Thanks
June 24th, 2005, 08:53 AM
zipp51

Try going to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management and right click on the drive you want to change then choose "change drive letter and paths".Should do the trick.:D
June 24th, 2005, 09:28 AM
niteghost

Quote:

Originally Posted by zipp51

Try going to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management and right click on the drive you want to change then choose "change drive letter and paths".Should do the trick.:D

Did that already before Posting. WinXP would NOT let me do it, saying " Windows cannot modify the drive letter of your System Volume or boot Volume "
June 24th, 2005, 13:58 PM
efc

Hopefully you have a windows boot disk. If not, find someone with Windows 98 and create one by going to Control Panel>Add/Remove software. Tab at top of window for creating recovery disk on a floppy.

Boot to dos prompt. Run fdisk.exe and delete all partitions. Now perform clean install.
June 24th, 2005, 15:43 PM
Conan

You can also delete all partitions if you boot with the XP disc, can't you?
June 24th, 2005, 19:11 PM
niteghost

Quote:

Originally Posted by Conan

You can also delete all partitions if you boot with the XP disc, can't you?

Not, very sure, the couple of times I did it , XP Recovery Disk , only "ask" which Partition U want XP to be installed and if U choose that particular Partition to install it, XP will "offer " U to format that particular Partition before installation,
This is all "new " to me, since Recovery has always been from a Recovery Partition D:/ that came along originally when I bought the PC, which is quite different from using a XP Reair and recovery Disk,
June 24th, 2005, 21:59 PM
Curio

You can do it all with the xp disk, at the start when it shows the partitions you can choose to delete them one by one then create a new one to install to. Install to the created partition then once booted to windows finish partitioning the drive using the disk management mmc.

If you use the recovery console you can do the same thing using diskpart - thats the same MS tool that is used in the install process.
June 24th, 2005, 22:57 PM
efc

Quote:

Originally Posted by Conan

You can also delete all partitions if you boot with the XP disc, can't you?

Yes, you can. I just figured that it would be easier for him to use fdisk.
June 25th, 2005, 05:31 AM
niteghost

It can be done at the BIOS or DOS level, and I am going to learn how to do it. First of all, as usual let me backup my 65 GIGs of data into an external drive before I mess around with the Boot volume, cause, I do not have room for error here. What have i got to lose, either way seems like i have to reformat and reinstall anyway.
June 25th, 2005, 08:55 AM
PIPER

I tend to agree with efc....it can be done with the xp cd if you don't have a win 98 boot disk.
June 25th, 2005, 21:40 PM
niteghost

I am going to try this, before I do another reformat and reinstall. One guy at another forum, have the same situation and did it successfully. Just want to share with U guys or another person runs into the same Problem the next time.

Hre is it :

Forgot exactly where I googled this from, but it worked for me in the same circumstances:

This procedure swaps drive letters for drives C and D. If you do not need to swap drive letters, simply name the \DosDevice\letter: value to any new drive letter not in use.
1. Make a full system backup of the computer and system state.

2. Log on as an Administrator.

3. Start Regedt32.exe.

4. Go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices key.

5. Click MountedDevices. On the Security menu, click Permissions. Check to make sure Administrators have full control. Change this back when you are finished with these steps.

6. Quit Regedt32 and start Regedit.exe Go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices key.

7. Find the drive letter you want to change to (new). Look for "\DosDevices\C:".

8. Right-click \DosDevices\C:, and then click Rename.

9. Rename it to an unused drive letter "\DosDevices\Z:". (This will free up drive letter C: to be used later.)

10. Find the drive letter you want changed. Look for "\DosDevices\D:".

11. Right-click \DosDevices\D:, and then click Rename.

12. Rename it to the appropriate (new) drive letter "\DosDevices\C:".

13. Click the value for \DosDevices\Z:, click Rename, and name it back to "\DosDevices\D:".

14. Quit Regedit and start Regedt32.

15. Change the permissions back to the previous setting for Administrators (this should probably be Read Only).

16. Restart the computer.

Just my way of saying thanks - niteghost
June 26th, 2005, 05:47 AM
joshsiao

Quote:

Originally Posted by niteghost

Did that already before Posting. WinXP would NOT let me do it, saying " Windows cannot modify the drive letter of your System Volume or boot Volume "

Of course! It'll mess up the registry and XP will crash since it directs the OS to take files from that drive letter which won't be there if the system volume drive letter has been changed.