Unable To Change The Damn Drive Letter

[icanhascpu2]

1. System has Windows 8 on it
2. Hard drive if failing
3. Get net hard drive -> Use Acronis to do a mirror bootable backup to new drive
4. New drive now has identical contents to old drive.
5. Boots up fine.
6. Windows tries to log in, everything is black

Now after short troubleshooting I narrowed it down to the new drive not taking the 'c' label. This is my problem.

1. Cannot login to Win8 on new drive in normal or safe mode
2. Can log into Win on old drive, but i cannot change the drive letter to C on new drive, as old drive hs the letter taken and I just get errors saying basically 'no'.


What is a guy to do? I just want to change a fricking drive letter so Windows 8 doenst crap all over itself anymore.

 

[mikeymikec]

Windows assigns IDs to hard disks. Your new disk has the installation for the old disk, is aware that there's a drive in existence with the old disk's ID, it really wants it to come back because it misses it and it saved a nice warm spot for it, and no, I don't know how to fix that problem directly 🙂 I've never seen an installation of Windows alter its own system drive letter without resulting in tears at bedtime.

However, I might suggest an alternate strategy. Start Windows up on the old disk, run a complete system backup (using Windows Backup) onto another storage medium, boot from the OS install DVD with only the new disk connected (with all partitions deleted), feed it the backup image, and in theory it should work.

I've never done it before, let me know how it goes if you don't get a better suggestion 🙂

My plan might require a bit of tweaking. I think leaving the current partitions on the new disk would be a bad idea because they probably are stamped with the old Windows installation's "I'm an external HDD" IDs on them, though the new disk might require some new installation IDs on it, so perhaps running a dummy install of Windows 8 on it (just get through setup and start Windows once), then run Windows Setup again and restore the backup onto it.

 

[Bubbaleone]

First rule of cloning: After the clone is created the computer must be shutdown and the original drive disconnected before attempting to boot the clone. Having booted the computer with both drives connected may have already corrupted the clone's boot manager, making it unbootable even if you now disconnect the original drive.


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