Renamed boot drive. Noe I can not boot windows.

[ProggyNoob]

Hello,
I have Windows XP. I recently changed my boot drive from I: to C: Now I can not get Windows to start. At first I was getting the blue screen that normally has the windows icon and the user icon but there is nothing there. The only thing I have been able to do is press F8 and get to a boot menu with no Safe Mode option though. What do I do from here to rename my boot drive back to it's original letter? Thanks

 

[hang-the-9]

Aside from the fact that it's odd that you had a boot drive that was I:, what steps did you take to change it? Is your hard-drive partitioned into several drive letters or was it just assigned a different drive letter?

Try unplugging all of the drives in the system aside from the OS drive. If it's the only drive in the system it should be detected as C:, see if it boots then.

Another thing you can try, take out the drive, install it in another system as a secondary drive, and look at the boot.ini file. By default it will look like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Does your disk info have different numbers in them?

 

[ProggyNoob]

I took the steps listed here to change the boot driver.

http://allthingsmarked.com/2006/08/31/howto-change-hard-drive-letters-and-paths/


@ hang-the-9: I do not know how to do option one and I do not have a second computer.

I pressed F8 at startup to try and get to safe mode but it only gets me to boot setup. With these listed.

HARD DISK
-SATA1: WDC WD7500AADS-OOL5B1
CDROM
-2nd MASTER: HL-DT-ST DVD-ROM GDR-H30N
-2nd SLAVE: OPTIARC DVDRW AD-7190A

I clicked hard disk and the same thing happened. I get the BSOD.

So what I have done now is put in my windows XP CD to get to Recovery Console because I might be able to recover or repair the boot.ini this way.


http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/ss/rconsole_4.htm

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/ht/repairbootini.htm

I can only get to step 4 of 6 in the first article though and then I get the same first 3 lines but the command prompt line only has
C:\>

What steps should I take next? Is it possible to change the drive letter back to the original letter I: this way?

 

[hang-the-9]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223188 Has some info, of course the first warning is that if you do this to a boot drive you won't be able to boot the system. Which is what happened here.

You really need some tools to make this work, without a second PC or know-how on how to change settings in a command prompt window or as a slave, drive you won't get far, or make things worse.

You may just need to buy a second hard drive, install Windows on that clean, and use the original drive for data storage.