Accidentally renamed my C drive to E drive

[elviswife]

while attempting to access my external hard drive, I noticed it was showing up as the G drive instead of E drive. So I attempted to rename it and accidentally renamed the C drive instead. Now the C drive says it's the E drive, and all the C drive stuff is gone. I though maybe rebooting it would "reset" it and now I just get the blue Windows XP screen. It doesn't go anywhere after that. I can get into safe mode at start up, and I chose boot from removable device, but that just took me back to the blue screen.

HELP!

 

[Hawkeye22]

If you can get into disk management while in safe mode, you might be able to reassign the drive letter back to C. Right-click the drive and you should see the option to change the drive letter.

 

[WyomingKnott]

If Hawkeye's solution does not work (and it should)

If you have another computer, or another boot disk

You can boot from another drive and edit the registry in this drive by using "load hive" and "unload hive." This is a VERY RISKY activity. You want to find the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices and delete the entry for "/DosDevices/E". It has worked for me in the past; it has made installations unusable in the past. Hope that Hawkeye gets you through it.

Oh: if there is one for "/DosDevices/E", delete that too.