Changed my c Drive by Accident

I have been so fustrated trying to find the solution to my problem. Hopefully my peeps here can help.

I went into disk management and I accidentally change my c drive to h. Why I did this? I had a mp3 player that needed a drive assigned. I chose the wrong drive and well obviously now I cant even launch windows xp prof since all files reference the C drive which now doesn't exist.

All I get is a blue screen. How can I change that drive back to c so that can access my computer once again ?

Thanks for your help

 

Have you tried safe mode - tap F8 during boot before the windows logo appears? If you can boot, go to control panel > administrative tools> computer namagement > disk management > Rt-clk the disk and choose "change drive letter..." and close and restart.

Or you can try choose last good... after the F8.

 

Might be worth a shot .........

Boot to the Recovery console and type fixmbr

 

Hook up the hard drive to another computer, and use the OS on that system to change the drive back to "C "?
Johanna

 

Good idea Johanna, but it won't work due to the fact that the C: drive letter will already be in use by the OS booted to.

If fixmbr doesn't get you there, do you have a bootable cd such as BartPE or ERD Commander? Or, can you slave the drive to extract some files or load a regsitry hive? Are you comfortable editing the registry?

 

Your OS isn't on C, so it is possible. Recovery Console won't be able to locate the files it needs to run.
Johanna

 

My primary OS isn't on C:, but the boot.ini for it and a few other files required by the OS are on C: If I change my C: letter, my E: OS will become unbootable.

 

I'm wondering how you did that? Assuming that the OS was installed on the C: drive, you would not be allowed to change the drive letter. XP just won't let you do that!

MMM, perhaps your OS is installed on some drive other than the C:. Do you have a dual boot system? Probably not but I have to ask.

Is it possible that you changed some other settings during your quest to change the drive letter?

Have you tried booting to the Advanced Boot Options screen by pressing the F8 key repeatedly following the POST screen? Then choose to boot the last known good...

Is your file system NTFS or FAT? If NTFS, the BartPE boot disk suggestion is a good idea. You will be able to use it to rename and replace the C:\windows\system32\config\system hive with one from the C:\Windows\Repair folder or possibly one from the system volume information folder.

Try the F8 method first and post back the results.

 

Thank You!

I'll try these solutions at home tonight.

I'll let you guys know how it all worked out!

Thanks again,
Potion