Change drive letter on a boot device
I've been running Vista and XP side by side for a few months now, and what I designated as a small partition has slowly got bigger and bigger until there was no space left on my Vista partition, so today I decided to re-jig my partitions. No problem, but due to the lack of partition managers for Vista, I had to boot back to XP and fire up Partition Magic. The problem started when I tried to boot back to Vista, which gave me loads of errors about files not being found before refusing to boot. I was pretty baffled by this point, because from XP I could see that the files that Vista was complaining were missing were right there where they were supposed to be. To fix Vista, I had to boot from the install CD and use the automated recovery tool, but then when I started Vista, my drive letters were all wrong. Now I could see which partitions matched which drive letters, but windows wouldn’t let me change them because they were for the system drive. After a good two hours of trawling through technet, I eventually found a solution:
1. Go to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
2. Find the drive letter you want to change to (new). Look for "\DosDevices\C:".
3. Rename it to an unused drive letter "\DosDevices\Z:".
This frees up drive letter C.
4. Find the drive letter you want changed. Look for "\DosDevices\D:".
5. Rename it to the appropriate (new) drive letter "\DosDevices\C:".
6. Click the value for \DosDevices\Z:, click Rename, and then name it back to "\DosDevices\D:".
April 25th, 2007
Thx mate!
Thats what I looked for!
October 22nd, 2007
Thanks a lot. I've been looking for this.
November 2nd, 2007
Yep; I am amazed it was that easy. I had imaged a 30G to a 80G drive, and Windows was hosed on bootup (C: and D: had switched places). This little regedit did the trick!!
November 13th, 2007
That worked! And so simple.
Thanks!
November 21st, 2007
Thanks champ! I was just about ready to boot in to another OS and swap both of the drive letters at the same time, that would’ve been a pain!
December 19th, 2007
That’s all fine and dandy, but I hope the drive letter swap is done immediately after a fresh install! Why you ask? Well keep in mind any software that was installed with the mixed up letters will point to the new drive contents and more than likely will error out or crash. Also, all those shortcuts on your desktop, and in the start menu will also be pointing to the wrong drive. I have found it easier just to live with the stupid vista drive letter swap. Just my 2c!
December 19th, 2007
If you’re going to change the drive letter, you’d change it after a fresh install anyway. The same problem happens if you move your program files directory to another partition and don’t copy the Microsoft apps installed in C:\Program Files\ to the new directory.
December 25th, 2007
My Vista installed on J: Drive for some reason. I have a couple of programs that give me an error as they want the operating system to be installed on C: Drive. Will this solution work for me - I have a lot of programs installed on the drive and it is fully mirrored (a good thing in that I have had two failed 500 gig seagate drives so far)
Thanks for any thoughts
December 25th, 2007
My Vista installed on J: Drive for some reason. I have a couple of programs that give me an error as they want the operating system to be installed on C: Drive. Will this solution work for me - I have a lot of programs installed on the drive and it is fully mirrored (a good thing in that I have had two failed 500 gig seagate drives so far)
Thanks for any thoughts
December 25th, 2007
If all of your data's mirrored onto the new partition, you shouldn't have any problems.
December 25th, 2007
If all of your data's mirrored onto the new partition, you shouldn't have any problems.
December 25th, 2007
My Vista installed on J: Drive for some reason. I have a couple of programs that give me an error as they want the operating system to be installed on C: Drive. Will this solution work for me - I have a lot of programs installed on the drive and it is fully mirrored (a good thing in that I have had two failed 500 gig seagate drives so far)
Thanks for any thoughts
December 25th, 2007
If all of your data’s mirrored onto the new partition, you shouldn’t have any problems.
January 13th, 2008
didnt work for me, i changed drive letters as above but now when boots takes a few minutes with message on screen saying preparing desktop then just get blank desktop screen with mouse pointer!!!!!!
January 13th, 2008
Sounds like it worked perfectly. You probably can't boot because you didn't copy the windows files to your new partition before you renamed. You might be able to copy them over with the recovery console.
April 26th, 2008
Hi,
how do I “go to” a registry?
Thanks
April 26th, 2008
To go to a key, Start->Run->Regedit, then navigate to the key.
May 14th, 2008
man you are the best !, i didn't believe it was that easy.
thanks
July 1st, 2008
For this, I ABSOLUTELY LOVE YOU. YOU HAVE NO IDEA OF THE PAIN IVE GONE THROUGH ALL DAY!!!!!!
September 5th, 2008
Thank you man. It helped
September 28th, 2008
wow, you saved my time to fix this issue.
I got the similar problem.
now fixed thanks to you.
thanks man.
Cheers!
November 11th, 2008
[...] his boot driver lettre to C when it has finsihed to boot…). I have followed those steps http://leghumped.com/blog/2007/01/09/change-drive-letter-on-a-boot-device/ Then reboot Vista 1 or 2 times and all show be fine for this [...]