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Disk Director Changed C:\ Drive Letter To I:\ For No Reason, Now Receiving "No NTLDR" Error in XP

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Hi I'm a bit dissappointed right now as up till now I was a big fan and had massive faith is Acronis DD. Howeveer, as the title indicates, while I was reshuffling some partitions DD decided of its own accord to relabel the C: drive as I:!! Now I can't boot up, obviously.

I had already moved the C Drive to a new, bigger HDD and had booted up just fine many times. But as it was reshuffling some other partitions ( I have about eight in total) it does this.

Why??

And, more importantly, how do I fix this? I'm sketchy about how booting works in windows. Please someone help me...

Can I get windows XP to relabel the I: drive as C: usiing the Recovery Console?? Or can I rewrite the boot files to get Bios to look in the new I: drive and run XP from there until I can change it back?? Will windows even run with a completely different drive letter?? I wish I knew more!!

Any wisdom much appreciated.
Thanks,
Tony

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Anthony:

When you say the drive letter has been changed to "I:", just how are you observing this? Are you booted to the recovery CD and looking at the drive letters? The boot CD runs Linux. Remember that Linux and Windows will label partitions differently, so ignore the letters you see when running from the boot CD. Instead, go by the size and contents or the labels of the partitions. It is doubtful that DD changed how the drive letter will appear when you boot into Windows.

What is more likely is that you may have moved the partition's location or changed its type from primary to logical or changed the active flag. Could you describe the "reshuffle"? Where was the Windows partition before the change (first primary partition, second primary partition, etc)? Where is it after the shuffle? Was it a primary partition before the shuffle and if so, is it still a primary partition? Was it the active partition before and is it still the active partition?

If the active flag was changed (the one with the red flag on the icon in DD) then you can easily reset it. If the partition was moved then you will only need to edit the boot.ini file to reflect the new location. This file can be edited directly with DD, and if this was the cause you should then be able to boot into XP. A typical boot.ini file looks 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

The number in red referenced by partition(n) needs to point to the Windows XP partition. In my example, WinXP is the first partition on this disk so n=1. If, for example, you moved the partition so that it's the second primary partition on the disk then the number needs to be 2.