help I made a mess of my win7 drives

[etrin]

I have win 7 ultimate 32 bit on my second computer and been using it for my htpc.
This drive has 3 partitions C D E
Well I put in a drive from another system and on it was a 100G fat32 partition with data on it.
Well inside of disk manager I changed it to ntfs and expanded it to the full drive
DRIVE F:
rebooted and missing bootmgr.
I booted up with the windows install disk and was trying to repair the boot sector and it says windows is on drive F.
I looked and drive C is now drive F and drive F is drive C
HUH

so I shutdown and removed the drive and now drive C is drive E

I checked around it it seems that this can happend when windows disk manager is used to expand partitions. God I should have just formatted but anyway its done now.
How can I get this mess fixed?

 

[Gooberlx2]

probably will need to use diskpart from the recovery console. Remove then reassign the drive letters.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766465(WS.10).aspx

I'm guessing it would go something like:
# diskpart
> list disk
> remove letter=c
> remove letter=f
> select disk 1
> list volume
> select volume 1
> assign letter=c
> select disk 4
> list volume
> select volume 1
> assign letter=f

...or something like that....PLEASE do more research about it though because it's not hard to totally fubar your drives and lose your data.

In the end you may still need to recover or rebuild the boot manager to the mbr of your OS drive using bootrec.

 

[etrin]

i removed the other hard drive.
drive has 3 partitions
list volume
volume # ltr fs type
volume0 f udf dvd-rom
volume1 e NTFS partition
volume2 d NTFS partition
volume3 c NTFS partition

c is an empty partion
d is the same as it was
e is my original c drive windows install

since c was drive f with the other disk installed and I remove that drive and now c is e
so c is being pushed to the back ( last partition ) of the list.

 

[Absolution75]

So you fixed it then?

It probably had nothing to do with windows. Your bios detected a new drive and it was probably attached to a higher priority SATA header (SATA_0, or SATA_1 etc) so the bios tried to boot from that hard drive instead of the original one.

 

[etrin]

no can not find a way to fix it.
C became f when the new drive was installed.
No bootmgr
remove new drive and back to a single drive with 3 partitions.
volume1 e NTFS partition
volume2 d NTFS partition
volume3 c NTFS partition

c is moved to the last one volume3.
When I originally installed windows on this drive I made a 100G partition and installed the os.
After everything was installed then I made partitions d and e.

Some how the first partition which has the windows install is now the last partition in the table.

I also found this about diskpart

diskpart
You cannot remove the drive letters on system, boot, or paging volumes.
so that is out.
I wonder if there is a way to change the volumes on the partitions?

tried bootmgr and it says working and fixed 0 windows installs.

 

[etrin]

I have a question.
After looking at the drive and its partitions
partition 1 shows its e and its almost empty.
partition 3 shows up as c and it where my windows7 is installed.

Is there a way to format partition 1 and copy all the files from partition 3 over to it?
Since windows will now be on the first partition and would it then boot?

 

[bankster55]

I guess the OP fixed it after all (been 4 days)
Thats a shame, would really like to know if his HTPC is storebought and if so, what brand it is. That would go a long way in explaining what happened here.

 

[etrin]

FINALLY LOL

I got a free version of paragon rescue kit.
It showed that the drive I inserted became the active primary.
my windows install became inactive.
the free version would not allow me to set it to active but it did allow me to boot into my install.
I changed the active to c and all is well.
funny if I remove the second drive the 3rd partition on the first drive became the active partition
so it was making the last partition as the active no matter what.

but after using the rescue disk to boot and going into drive mgr and setting it back to active on my original install its working great.
again this option is greyed out on the free version of rescue disk but it did allow me to boot into windows and change it.

 

[bankster55]

Glad to see you finally got going.
As I mentioned above, I would be interested in knowing what type of HTPC you have - storebought or self built?

 

[RebateMonger]

Drive letter order of assignment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_letter_assignment

1.Assign the drive letter A: to the first floppy disk drive (drive 0), and B: to the second floppy disk drive (drive 1).
2.Assign a drive letter, beginning with C: to the first active primary partition recognized upon the first physical hard disk.
3.Assign subsequent drive letters to the first primary partition upon each successive physical hard disk drive.
4.Assign subsequent drive letters to every recognized logical partition, beginning with the first hard drive and proceeding through successive physical hard disk drives.
5.Assign subsequent drive letters to any RAM Disk.
6.Assign subsequent drive letters to any additional floppy or optical disc drives.

The thing that likely messed you up was that your old Windows partition wasn't the ACTIVE partition on the disk. Also, your original disk containing Windows may not have been the first disk in the BIOS boot order. There can only be a single Active parition on a disk, and if a partiton is on the first disk in the BIOS order and is Active, it will be C: .