Multibooting changing drive letters

E

estim8r

Member
I've been happily used EasyBCD for quite a while, booting into Windows 7 64 bit (C), Vista 32 bit (D) and Windows XP 32 bit (E). I had 2 hard drives set up in a RAID 1 configuration and everything was fine until 1 drive failed. I backed everthing up to a network drive and replaced both hard drives with 1 TB drives, loaded Windows 7 from the CD, partitioned the drives, then brought everything back in. Now when I use EasyBCD to mutiboot everything is fine if I boot into Windows 7. If I boot into Vista, my Windows 7 drive letter changes to S and it has assigned C to the 'System Reserved' partition. While not a major issue I'm just very used to copying and pasting from one drive to another in Windows Explorer. I don't even know if this is a NewSmart issue or just something I did wrong when I loaded the new hard drives, but I'd like the drive letters to stay no matter where I boot to.
 
Nothing to do with EasyBCD.
Windows sets letters dynamically at boot (in PnP detection order) unless you've manually assigned your own preferences in Disk Management.
You can go there now and change letters for any partition/device that doesn't have the boot, system or page flags.
 
Just for the sake of consistency, it is possibly easier to have all drive letters assigned so that they are the same from every installation. But that is not necessary. I have 3 Windows installations on my main physical drive, all on separate drive C:'s. You can have as many C: drives as you want, from the perspective of the booted OS. It is commonly misunderstood that partitions have drive letters, but they have them only after they are assigned by the registry or PnP at boot time.A machine that is turned off has no drive letter assignments. So drives can have different letters in different installations, as many who have erased or formatted the wrong drive can attest.

Never identify drives by letter, but use size, location, or contents to be sure you have the right one.
 
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