boot drive always C

liteace

Member
Ive loaded this program on my second work laptop, the other, main laptop has it loaded, it has a 1Tb ssd drive that has been partitioned into 10 drives, when I boot whatever drive I boot into its always shown as C drive.

I have tried to do the same with my second laptop but I can only boot into 2 of the 5 partitions and they show as C, I see on my other laptop, under > view setting, the device: \ device\Harddiskvolume is numbered and not lettered, for example, this laptop has:


Entry #2
Name: 64 bit D
BCD ID: {47ebeda9-3e90-11e7-8578-c8453884640d}
Drive: D:\
Bootloader Path: \Windows\system32\winload.exe

The other laptop, where I have :

"Drive: D:\"

its says:

device: \ device\Harddiskvolume8

then the next 9 then 11 then 3 and so on, looks like some magic has been done to change the drive letter into a volume number, anyone have any idea how this is done or how I can do this

Thanks
 
There are no disk letters in the BCD, just human-unintelligible UIDs
EasyBCD translates that machine friendly gobbledegook into a nice user-friendly disk letter for you, using the registry map of the running system.
That's why disk letters appear to change in the static BCD when you boot into another OS.
It's merely that the new OS is using a different map (and usually the boot drive is C)
If the running system does not have a letter mapped for any particular drive, EasyBCD will use the volume number.
Nothing has changed (and you can't change anything, and don't need to). It's just that you're looking at the same thing through a different lens.
 
Thanks for the info, the OS on both laptops is w7, on the main laptop with the 1Tb SSD, 3 of the partitions are 64 bit thre remaining 7 are 32 bit.

My second, soon to be works laptop also has the same OS but only 5 partitions, 2 x 64 bit and 3 x 32 bit

Its the second laptop I am having the problem with, I would like if at all poss, what ever partition I boot into for it to show in "computor" as C drive the same as it does on my main laptop.

I have tried removing the drive letter from within the partition manager but then I get a couple of partitons that will not boot ?

Thanjks
 
That's a different matter completely. Nothing to do with the BCD.
When you install a Windows OS from Vista onwards, (rules were slightly different with XP) the Setup installation routine will create the new OS as C:\ if you have booted the installation DVD.
If you merely run Setup from an existing Windows, it cannot allocate the same letter twice (and normally the running system will be C) so the new OS will be assigned the first unused letter in the running system's registry.
Once installed that OS's identity is as good as writtten in stone. (It is written innumerable times into the created registry hive, describing the location of all of the drivers for example.)
There are undoubtably utilities available which will be able to find and edit all of the occurences of the rogue letter for you. Some partition managers for example, when copying an OS partition, will change its identity in that way, but you cannot simply make a single change anywhere which will do what you want. Disk Management won't allow you to attempt a letter change for any partition containing "system" "active" or "page" flags for the very reason you found when you attempted to do it with a partition manager. The OS becomes unbootable.
The only exception to the rule is if the letter was originally one thing and became accidentally altered rendering the OS unbootable. That can be fixed by zapping the registry back to what that one entry had been.
Reinstallation of the OS is the simplest way to reallocate its identity if you don't have a utility designed for that specific purpose.
There's no problem with OSs all booting with different identities. A colleague on here does just that on purpose. My OSs both boot as C: but are known to each other as D: when not actually booted.
It used to cause problems with badly coded third party programmes if an OS was not C: but another C: disk was visible (they tended to have hard-coded instuctions to install bits of themselves in C:\user location and other bits in the system volume) but thankfully such sloppiness is getting rarer and unless you are still using some stuff left over from Windows 95, it's not likely to catch you out.
 
Back
Top