Changing D:\ to C:\

[Icabod]

I have an acer laptop running Vista home premium. i have a 160gb hard drive that is split in half. today i partitioned on half again to make a dual boot setup and that worked fine. Once i had finished installing, i found that i could not do a dual boot set up and it was as if i had made no change except install a completely new version of vista.

I formated the new partion in the hope that it would go back to the old setup but it didnt and its like theres nothing on the hard drive. So i ran disk recovery and found that the formated partion ( the one with out any OS ) had become the C:\ drive and the original C:\ had become D:\. So i belive that that is why it is not booting.

And i was wondering how you can change the Drive letters around or mabey even delete that partition so that it is no longer a problem? in Ms dos as i can get to that from the recovery disk mabey ??

Any help will be greatfully apreciated

Many thanks

For info. Previous topic

http://forums.windowsforum.org/index.php?s...c=38692&hl=

[Boris]

Vista - changing Drive letters

..... but please note that you cannot change a drive letter if the drive is either a system partition or a boot partition :(

[Icabod]

Vista - changing Drive letters

..... but please note that you cannot change a drive letter if the drive is either a system partition or a boot partition :(

Thankyou for the reply :)

i cant even get into windows, i was hoping there was a way in ms dos to do it but i dont know what to type.

[Boris]

Unfortunately for you, very few of W/Fs members run Vista - the majority being far happier with the tried and trusted XP.

I would think that your problem could possibly be fixed by using the Vista boot manager (see below)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc721886.aspx

This is not very user-friendly and definitely not for the faint hearted ??? and I'm sorry that I can't really help you further.

Did your Acer not prompt you to create a full recovery DVD(s) to take the machine back to its initial supplied state ? - all the recent Acer machines that I have set up for other people reminded you of the need for this. I think that you can get into the recovery process by holding down ALT + F10 on booting ?

[Boris]

Just out of interest, what were you trying to dual boot with Vista ?

[Icabod]

Just out of interest, what were you trying to dual boot with Vista ?

I am very greatful for you help, i have tried the alt+f10 but when i start it up it instantly looks the OS and it doesnt work for me. To me what has happened is, in partioning, it has turned the orginal active partition ( the one with vista on ) and made it D:\ and the new C:\ is blank so during the boot process, its like a new pc that has never even seen an OS before. i doubt there is way to change the active partitions on dos though ??

i was actually trying to boot OS X, it worked but wasnt great lol so i wiped it and now the C:\ is D:\ and im stumped but i think i know that that is the problem now :)

thanks again for all your help

[Hb_Kai]

Isn't OS X a Mac OS?

If it is I always thought you have to have a Mac PC to use their OS on because of some things like the mouse and whatever else.

[mark2]

Using a live linux disk, such as puppy linux you may be able to try a couple of things.

1 Using Gparted, temporarily hide the C drive and set your D drive as active, then delete the c and resize the d drive to use that space.

2 Not using vista myself , you may be able to edit the BCD information in \Boot\Bcd to point to your D partition by using a text editor.

there are also other things to try if you have access to tools such as drive image or Acronis, in that you could probably clone your D to C

[Luis 2012]

Gparted, which is a LiveVD, is able to change partitions to be active and even if for some reason it can't you can just delete the C: partiton, expand the D:, and then D: will become C: again. And then just make you empty partition while running Vista so there's no wayt it will mess up the lettering.