Changed Drive Letter now windows wont boot :(

Well i wanted to change my HDD letter to C: from E: so i used disk director. It asked me to restart and when it did restart i left and went to have breakfast. When i came back the screen was black. I restarted again and i found out it goes black when it should show the windows logo and the loading bar. i am currently posting this using knoppix andy help would be appreciated thanks!

 

This might be as simple as editing boot.ini, which will be in your root directory of your 'C' drive or it might be that the registry settings need to be reconfigured.

First check boot.ini, this can be opened in any text editor - assuming that you have one or more partitions but only one hard drive.

[boot loader]
;timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect sos

make sure you have partition(1) and that rdisk is (1).

If it is registry that needs altering then the best thing is to bung in your XP CD choose console mode (the first repair option that comes up) and then type in bootcfg/ rebuild the space after / is important, if that doesn't work then again from within console mode type fixboot C:, your final option before doing a complete XP recovery is to use fixmbr.

If none of those work then as far as I can see a complete recovery via the second option to repair (from the install menu) would be required. This will just wipe out XP system files and any updates but leaves all your programs and registry entries alone.

It would also be worth checking in DD that the hard drive is still set to active and is a primary drive.

Colin