Resolved WinXP Boot Drive thinks it's Drive D: - can't change it

Details on how I got into this mess are below. Right now my problem is that my boot drive (a WDC 80GB IDE) can only be seen by the system as Drive D - Not as Drive C . This makes it impossible to run anything on it after booting, because everything expects to be on Drive C. I've tried many procedures, and the Windows Recovery Console and using the Fixmbr, Fixboot, and Bootcfg /rebuild commands, but nothing has worked. All my files and programs are there, but I can't run anything. Even Windows Explorer won't work. Can anyone provide a fix to turn "Drive D" into a proper "Drive C "? If so, thank you!

Frank D

Here's the background: I use two identical 80-GB hard drives (C and D and back up C to D, using Paragon Drive Copy 8 software, every week as a cloned, bootable disk copy, so if C goes down, I can put D in its place, adjust the jumper to master, and reboot into Windows. I've been doing this for a couple of years, and it has always worked well, though I never had a need to try out the cloned disk D. That was my "Plan A ".

Moving to the present, on Aug. 12th (2 1/2 days ago) I got a copy of a new, commercial program (via GiveawayOfTheDay - Paragon 9.5) that has partition management features. I thought I'd try it out by removing a tiny (8-MB) partition from Drive C: that's always been there and was bugging me. BIG MISTAKE! I started things in motion and left the PC running overnight. Next morning there was a Paragon message on the screen: "There was an internal error." When I rebooted, I got a black screen saying that HAL.DLL was missing or corrupt. To make a long story short, not only HAL.DLL was missing, but everything on the C drive was missing or garbled! Just spurious junk files were left where there had been all my programs and data.

OK, I figured, now is the time to put "Plan A" into action. I switched drives (with D now in place of C and rebooted. AGGGHHH! Same message: missing or corrupt HAL.DLL. How could this be? Had the Paragon 9.5 done something to both drives? (I still can't figure out how that would happen.) I inserted my WinXP Pro install CD and ran the Recovery Console, and determined that on the D drive, at least, all my original files were there -- the disk just couldn't boot. So to make a long story short I went through all the procedures I could find on the Web (using my wife's PC) to rebuild or restore Windows and make the drive bootable.

Here's a list of the ones I tried:
"How to recover from a currupted registry "
http://www.aade.com/XPhint/XPrecovery.htm\
"How to Perform a Windows XP Repair Install "
http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm
"Langa Letter: XP's No-Reformat, Nondestructive Total-Rebuild Option "
http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189400897
"How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting "
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545
"How to perform an in-place upgrade (reinstallation) of Windows XP "
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315341
"How Do I Do a 'Repair Installation'? "
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/xp_repair_install.htm
Step-By-Step: Reinstall Windows - PC World
http://www.pcworld.com/article/105866
Step-By-Step: Reinstall Windows
/stepbystep_reinstall_windows.html
"Langa Letter: XP's Little-Known 'Rebuild' Command "
http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=185301251

OK, now the drive is bootable. However, nothing I've tried has worked to make this D drive back into a C drive. The bottom line is that the drive is bootable -- but it's unusable!

Is there any way to fix this?

P.S. I've left out the ":" (colons) on the Drive names above because they were showing up as smilies when paired with "C" and "D ".

P.P.S. I tried this procedure:
How to restore the system/boot drive letter in Windows
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223188
The first time I tried it in Windows itself, the second time in BartPE's environment, and neither time did it work.

Update 1: while in the BartPE environment's A43 (Windows Explorer substitute) window, I see that the drive letter has indeed been changed to C: (from D: ), but when I boot back into Windows, it still shows up as D: .

Update 2: I just tried the two suggested procedures at http://www.techsupportforum.com/har...port/18452-rename-hard-drive-c.html#post90219 and they didn't work either.

 

No responses so far, probably because it's a weekend and people are away doing fun things.

In view of nothing else working, and no other ideas being forthcoming, I'm thinking of a different approach:

Instead of using the imaging technique to try to recreate a bootable drive, which obviously can't work here because it brings along with it the drive letter, I'm going to use the NTBackup program in Windows XP to back up the files and system state on my D drive to a drive on another machine, and then restore that backup to my newly reformatted and bootable original C drive, temporarily installed in the other machine as a secondary drive. This would bypass the problem of the OS ending up on a drive with the letter D instead of C.

It might work.

Frank D

 

It worked!

NTBackup saved my bacon. After following my last posted plan, I didn't lose anything up to the point of my last-created image (2009/08/01 -- I was a bit overdue). There's a little tidying up to do, but the C drive is both bootable and all my programs, files, e-mails, etc., are there. Some of the programs will have to be reinstalled (Microsoft Office for example), but most others are working with no problems. The loss of the 11 days' work from then to 2009/08/12 is at least bearable and is now chalked up to experience.

There's no moral to this story. It's Murphy's Law at work. Things that should have worked didn't, and things that shouldn't have happened did. I seriously would like to understand why what happened did happen, and I'd like to know why none of the posted remedies I tried (other than my own "kludge ") worked.

The only ways I could have prevented or mitigated this near-disaster would have been to (a) not use this new software at all, or (b) disconnect Drive D from the PC before running the new software on Drive C. I could also have tried out the new software on a spare drive, but even that wouldn't have predicted what actually happened to my C and D drives.

After three and a half days of anxiety, hard work and frustration, I guess all's well that ends well!

Frank D