How change drive letters back after Vista install

  • Thread starter Thread starter Zoot
  • Start date Start date
dismgmt.msc would not let me change all of the drives. The partition with
Vista on it of course couldn't be changed, but it would not let me change
any other partitions on the same physical disk, even the non-Vista
partitions. So instead I edited the registry at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices. By doing so, I was successfully
able to change the drive letters that Vista would not let me change. So far
it is working fine, although it seems to me that it is almost too simple to
be true.

I was even able to change the drive Vista is installed from, but the problem
with that is that once an OS is installed, it hard codes the drive letter
all over the registry and it's not really feasible to change this.

AFAIK, the bios doesn't assign drive letters, the OS does. There is a
generally accepted pattern to doing this, and all Windows OS's except for
Vista (and possibly Server 2008) initially follow this. Vista breaks the
rules by doing its own thing.
 
Succes at last! I copied the vista DVD files on to a temp directory of my G:
drive and started the install from there, while running XP64 from the C:
partition. For whatever reason, doing it this way caused Vista to not only
install into the G: partition, but when finished and booting to Vista, it
remained the G: partition. Weird. The key here is not to boot off of the
Vista CD, but to install it from a running OS already on the computer.
Weird.....
 
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