How to clone a boot disk with the wrong drive letter and change that drive lette

[cablecritter]

I did as the instructions say on leghumper thread, but after I change the drive letters, in my case drive E to C, it doesn't boot. I have 2 cloned drives using HBD, however, they are both calling for E. When I have them both in the box at the same time, of course, only 1 can be E, and I can change the mirror to C. When I boot to C, it changes to E. Now I have both drives present in the system with the regedit change of the drive letters, however, never gets beyond the Windows XP logo screen with the mouse point. If I use DART to go into the registry and change the letters of one of the drives back to E, it boots. I've put several hours(way to much time) into this when I simply could have reloaded this XP machine. What am I missing here guys? Thanks in advance

Cablecritter

 

[jitpublisher]

I don't know what the "leghumper" thread is, or what HBD software is either. Have you tried loading up the XP cd as if you where to reinstall XP but instead go to the recovery console, type "fixmbr" at the command prompt once you have entered the XP logon and follow the instructions there? If the drives still won't boot, is it possible the cloning software you used did not work correctly. Are you certain the original disk that you cloned was bootable and working correctly? Pardon the questions, but since you started a new thread, I am not completely sure how you got to this point. It sounds like you simply made copies of an OS drive and are now tying to get them to boot, which won't work. How did you end up with multiple "clones" of the same OS drive? Cloning software will not make multiple duplicate copies of an OS drive that will be bootable.

PS, for cloning and working with drives and backups, Acronis True Image is fast, easy to use, and simply works. Have used it for years in many various situations and always works perfectly. It is free to download for trial time period, but if you buy it, it is worth every penny.

 

[Ubrales]

Once an old drive is cloned to a new drive, the old drive must be replaced with the newly cloned drive.

After that, the old drive may be formatted (or all data erased) and used as a storage drive.

 

[HairyToes]

I cloned my old spinner disk to a SSD and this happened.

It would boot very slowly to a blank desktop, no start menu.

1. Press Ctrl-Shift-ESC to pull up the Task Manager.
2. File -> Run -> diskmgmt.msc
3. On the drive that should be C:, "Change Drive letters and paths"
4. Change it's drive letter to (or add) C:

This threw an invalid properties error, but after rebooting it was C:.

Note I did something else also.
1. File -> Run -> regedit
2. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> Mounted Devices
3. Delete all mounted devices.

This is an old trick you can use if your usb stick shows up at F: and you also have a mapped drive F:.... it does no harm but do be careful in the registry editor, changing other things can render your computer inoperable. Anyway, after a reboot most of the entries are populated again.

Also, this is Win7 home. The drive letter issue is the same XP->7