Drive characters problem

I needed to do some maintance on a harddisk so I temporary connected it instead of my CD-ROM and started Win2000. Windows set the drive character to C:, I'm booting W2000 from D: (on C: drive are W98), my former C: drive changed to E:. When I disconnected the harddisk drive mapping stayed the same, that means I have D: and E: and no C:.
I need to change the drive mapping to C: and D: but I can't. Win2000 say that E: is system disk and it's character can't be changed. Strange, because they (W2000) did it themself before.
Could anyone help me, please?

Thanks,
Teo

 

Sorry my English, I have Czech version of Windows and don't know the right terms.

 

Let me make sure I am clear on this whole process.

- You have Win98 on a drive.
- You have Win2000 on another drive.
- You inserted a 3 drive to do some work and it had a bootable version of Win2000 on it.

You now have no C: and Win98 is on D: and Win2000 on E:

Which drive to you wish to label as C:? The Win9x or 2K?

What entries does your boot.ini file have at this time?

 

Ok, I'll specify it.

Primary master: 60GB divided into 8GB with Win98 (C: ) + 52GB with Win2000(D: )
Primary slave: 2.5GB with Linux (not visible under Windows)
(maybe the 60GB disk is slave and 2.5GB master, I'm not sure now but that's not important)

Secondary master: CD-RW (E: )
Secondary master: DVD-ROM (F: )

I'm booting with LILO where I choose Linux or Windows. When I select Windows there's another choice between W98 and W2000.

boot.ini:
[boot loader]
timeout=5
default=C:\
[operating systems]
C:\= "Microsoft Windows "
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT= "Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect


I've disconnected both CD/DVD drives and connected third harddisk with damaged filesystem (not bootable). Booted Win2000 from D: and things messed up (only in Win2000!).

Then I disconnected the third harddisk and reconnected CD/DVD drives. In W98 the drive letters are ok (as stated above). In Win2000 there's no C: only D: (Win2000), E: (Win98), F: and G: (CD/DVD drives).

I want to change E: to C: but I can't because W2000 say that E: is system disk.

Is it clear now?

Thanks,
Teo

 

I think I've found solution of my problem. I've found a nice registry variable: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup\SystemPartition ". I changed its value and then the drive E: is no longer a system patition! Than I've changed E: to C: and restored "SystemPartition" variable's original value and everything's working fine.

 

Thanks for posting back the fix. Will likely help others who may run into the same issue.