[AccessD] OT: W2K gurus your advice is needed...

Shamil Salakhetdinov shamil at smsconsulting.spb.ru
Fri Aug 15 11:54:22 CDT 2003


Hi All,

Here is a tough one - at least the system engineers I know here can't answer
this question/help me:

- as the result of my hardware upgrade and different (stupid) manipulations
I've got my system disk (W2K) getting I: as drive letter instead of C:
during booting (all the other five disks are OK - D:, E:, F:, G:, H:)...

Funny? Yes - as the result when I try to logon after booting it accepts
password but then after some time instead of showing desktop icons etc. it
shows "Saving your settings" dialog and returns to Logon dialog...

I've found that system disk gets I: drive letter instead of C: by connecting
to the problematic PC from another computer and by using Disk Management
system utility. I've also used Event viewer to see that W2K can't start
system programs and services because it expects C:\..... as system drive...
(It's interesting that it works at all... - this W2K is a good software....)

MS probably never tested such a use case as I managed to create here!...

Well, the question is how/and where can I set system drive letter back to
C:. I tried to find something in registry but failed. Is that written in a
system file? Which one?

Of course I've backup and I can try to restore from it but maybe it's
quicker to replace just one(?) file where physical<->logical disk
correspondence is stored? (I've spent quite some time on all that - first
thought was that this is MSBLAST but I run MSBLAST fix and it didn't find
anything... )

Does anybody know how is this drive mapping system file called and is it
possible to solve my task by just overwriting this file? (of course I will
boot from another drive and use problematic drive as slave and use backup
copy to overwrite system file keeping drives mappings)...

TIA for any info, tips and tricks,
I hope there are real NT gurus here,
Shamil

--
e-mail: shamil at smsconsulting.spb.ru
Web: http://www.smsconsulting.spb.ru/shamil_s




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