How to change drive letters and set active partitions outside of XP?

[Shenkoa]

I have a problom, my PC thinks that E: is my windows directory and that C: is not when in reality C: is and E: contains my Mp3's.

I have been trying my butt off to fix this with no luck. Does any one know how to fix this error?

 

[nweaver]

reinstall with the extra drives disconnected. Windows sucks at this stuff (not allowing you to determine mount points for some things)

 

[Shenkoa]

Same drive with 2 partitions.

 

[keeleysam]

All you can do is reinstall Windows with JUST your DVD drive and main drive installed.

 

[keeleysam]

Originally posted by: Shenkoa
Same drive with 2 partitions.

Make sure you are installing to the primary partition.

 

[Shenkoa]

Originally posted by: keeleysam
All you can do is reinstall Windows with JUST your DVD drive and main drive installed.

Come on thats the easy way out, I want to do it the hard way and convert.

 

[evilsaint]

I'm not quite sure how you ended up with this happening but I had this same problem, except the other way around, recently when I installed a second new copy of XP onto my freshly installed SATA drive.

The utility that helped me most (in XP, at least) is DiskPart, which you can run from a plain ol' command prompt while logged into XP (and 2K also, I think). The DiskPart in the Recovery a completely different program altogether, so steer clear of that one.

I'd give you step by step directions, but it seems like you'd have more fun doing it yourself, so hit up your nearest command prompt, type 'diskpart', and enjoy 😀

This is assuming, of course, that you can boot into XP... in the case that you can't, well, umm... do you have another box that you can burn a BartPE bootdisk from? :frown:

 

[evilsaint]

BTW, hope you like working @ the command line 😉

 

[NogginBoink]

You can muck with HKLM\System\MountedDevices to rearrange drive letters.

Use caution; you can do some serious damage here in a short amount of time, including rendering your machine unbootable. Enable Remote Registry and ensure it works before changing values as a safety measure.

Marking a partition active is a bit in the MBR and can be set using many tools, including a DOS boot disk with FDISK.