Re-partitioned HDD - now Windows 7 on D: - NEED HELP!

[LordX]

Ok, let me start off this forum by getting a huge point across so no one else needs to: I am an idiot.

I was upgrading a HDD to SSD for a lawyer client of mine today.

I was going to image it - since they have tons of obscure and outdated programs without installation media available.

The old drive had a super weird partition that was causing imaging problems.

SO without backup of any kind, I used Partition Magic to eliminate the empty problem partition, and move/resize the good partition.

Took hours, and seemed to have completed correctly.

However, now when booting into the PC - Windows 7 identifies itself on D:

I tried using diskmgmt.msc, and diskpart to assign C: - but they wont let me do it.

I booted off of the Win7 Thumb drive I have and went to REPAIR - oddly, it shows as C: there (which is REALLY odd, since when I do that on most people's systems, the Win drive shows as D on that).

SO............ I am hoping logically this is possible to do, since Parted Magic was able to switch it from C: to D: - I am hoping there is a reverse.

 

[brandonkick]

You should have stopped when you couldn't image it.

I'd like to imagine something like clonezilla would have been able to get a good clone.

Sounds like you probably blew away the 100MB partition that windows 7 creates upon installation.


I'm not sure why you'd be taking this kind of task on, especially if this machine was used for his legal
business. If it wasn't something you've done before, and you weren't confident, you should have left
it alone.

What do you see when you go into disk management? Whats the structure look like of the SSD now?

 

[tf76]

An image speaks a 1000 words. Show us the disk management window

 

[NYJimbo]

Stop what you are doing and image the drive now. There are tools out there that claim they can fix this but I have not done it myself and you will have to google it.

As to WHY you had to do this, was the hard drive showing any solid errors ? You say the move took forever, did you see a lot of retry attempts or did you have to turn off warnings just to get it done ? I think moving good data into the disk space that was having trouble before, might mean you have more than just the missing partition to worry about.

 

[LordX]

Drive is imaged already.... no problem with the imaging aspect EXCEPT for the drive letter problem.

Both the original, and the clone, show the drive letter as D:

Lets try and focus on the issue at hand as opposed to why I am an idiot.. I will explain my stupidity AFTER it is fixed.....

 

[NYJimbo]

Lets try and focus on the issue at hand as opposed to why I am an idiot.. I will explain my stupidity AFTER it is fixed.....

You're the only one calling you an idiot.

 

[LordX]

Also - when I load the drive into acronis, it is calling the 100mb partition C:, and the boot partition D:

 

[LordX]

Found the solution after a little digging.....

"

1. Start Regedit
2. Go to the following registry key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
3. Click MountedDevices.
4. On the Security menu, click Permissions.
5. Verify that Administrators have full control. Change this back when you are finished with these steps.
6. Quit Regedt32.exe, and then start Regedit.exe.
7. Locate the following registry key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
8. Find the drive letter you want to change to (new). Look for "\DosDevices\C:".
9. Right-click \DosDevices\C:, and then click Rename.
   
   Note You must use Regedit instead of Regedt32 to rename this registry key.
10. Rename it to an unused drive letter "\DosDevices\Z:".
    
    This frees up drive letter C.
11. Find the drive letter you want changed. Look for "\DosDevices\D:".
12. Right-click \DosDevices\D:, and then click Rename.
13. Rename it to the appropriate (new) drive letter "\DosDevices\C:".
14. Click the value for \DosDevices\Z:, click Rename, and then name it back to "\DosDevices\D:".
15. Quit Regedit, and then start Regedt32.
16. Change the permissions back to the previous setting for Administrators (this should probably be Read Only).
17. Restart the computer.

That was it...................................................................................................................................................................................................

 

[LordX]

"You're the only one calling you an idiot." - I take it back now.......

 

[brandonkick]

Well, you got it sorted.

But more importantly, learn from this. Never proceed without a good backup when doing this type
of a task, especially when it's a business machine and as you've said the setup is complex and
there are software with no way or at least no easy way to re install.

EDIT: I guess I should qualify "good backup". You shouldn't have had to blow away
partitions to get a good sector by sector clone of the drive. You did actually image the machine
but you had to change the structure of the original drive. Risky business.

 

[nlinecomputers]

OK call me confused, call me a skeptic. But how the heck does a bad image CHANGE KEYS IN THE REGISTRY to a different drive letter? Perhaps this was misinstalled from the beginning?

 

[LordX]

nline - there was something really goofy with this drive from the beginning.

In fact, I think the system may have been imaged PREVIOUSLY from another system. It was a 1tb hdd, with a 500GB usable partition, and then an empty partition. But not totally un-initialized.

The guy uses about 50gb of actual space, so we were moving him to a 240GB SSD.

Acronis would not shrink the volumes because of this pesky empty partition.

So my initial goal was to simply remove the empty partition with gparted. I did that - but made the mistake of moving and expanding the original partition as well.

So this took HOURS to complete. It had to move all the data and then resize. Somewhere in the process of moving all the data across partitions, this drive letter change happened.

NOW though, I was able to use Acronis to shrink the old drive onto the new one.

And now that I got the drive letter issue figured out - the system boots and loads normally.

PS - This was like a bios update gone wrong... we have all done so many bios flashes that it seems normal and commonplace, but we all know in the back of our heads that if something goes wrong you have a bricked mobo.... I guess I got too comfy with partition editing in the same way.

PPS - I was in somewhat of a time crunch last night - and I needed SUGGESTIONS first - I can answer the whys and shoulda coulda woulda's after the problem is solved.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Acronis would not shrink the volumes because of this pesky empty partition.

So my initial goal was to simply remove the empty partition with gparted. I did that - but made the mistake of moving and expanding the original partition as well.

So this took HOURS to complete. It had to move all the data and then resize. Somewhere in the process of moving all the data across partitions, this drive letter change happened.

This is why I have doubts. If I understand your description correctly. You had free space in front of the active partition? So the partition couldn't just be expanded like it would normally be it had to be moved? Sounds like to me that this version of Windows already was booting from D: to begin with. You never noticed because it booted properly and you, understandably, didn't think to check. Because the C: partition somehow got nuked, windows was installed on D instead.

 

[nlinecomputers]

I wonder if this system was originally setup to dual boot with like Xp on Drive C and Win7 on D: and at some point they removed XP and just left Windows 7 were it was?

 

[LordX]

That is all possible - however, if windows was originally booting from D: - it shouldn't have had any problems being on D.... but it did. As soon as I moved it to C: - the whole thing works.

 

[ZenTree]

Least you got it fixed. I learnt the hard way when I started and a re partitioning went horribly HORRIBLY wrong and we hadn't imaged first. I always do it now, even if it looks like an easy job. Those are always the ones that go wrong.

Thanks for sharing the steps to solve it also.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Things like this are why you do a RAW partition image. DDrescue does this. So do many of the windows based image programs though DDrescue is probably better on any drive that might have questionable sectors.

 

[LordX]

Do those programs support shrinking the volume? I know Clonezilla (at least my version) does not.

 

[LordX]

nline - I think I may have an idea as to what happened.

Each of the partitions in the registry had a hex code associated with them.

So when Gparted was done with the re-partitioning, I think there were no drive letter associations left since the hex codes for the partitions would have likely changed. Also, the first boot attempt did NOT work.

Then, I used the Win7 startup disk to 'repair' the startup - and I read the log, but missed an important part. Startup repair named the 100mb partition C:........... so the windows partition defaulted to D!

Needless to say, I will be wary in the future - but it's good to know that there is a way out of this mess.

Wish I had that knowledge in the windows xp days - remember that? If some systems had card readers on them, and you didn't double check, then sometimes the boot drive would have been put as E: or F:?

 

[nlinecomputers]

hen, I used the Win7 startup disk to 'repair' the startup - and I read the log, but missed an important part. Startup repair named the 100mb partition C:........... so the windows partition defau

DING DING DING. The repair tool WILL make those changes. Image programs don't.