Swapping Volume In WinXP

[Piyono]

My Documents and Settings / data drive (a'la this thread) is on the fritz and I don't have a replacement for it.

Have a look at my drive layout, attached.

HDD 2 is the failing drive. I want to move D&S from there to G on HDD 1 until I get a replacement (which will be a while as I'm broke). How do I do it so that Windows wakes up on the next boot thinking that G is now D?

Piyono

 

[MaxBurn]

Not sure but what I would do is move the data, pull the drive and reboot. From there just reassign the drive letter in disk management.

 

[Piyono]

I suspect that what might happen with just pulling the drive is that XP might not boot past the welcome screen, because it's expecting to find the Documents and Settings folder on the D volume, so unless it automatically remaps the second partition on the first drive from G to D, which I doubt it will do, I may well be doing irreparable damage to Windows, in which case I may as well reformat now.

Piyono

 

[ddrueding]

Never tried it, but Merc's suggestion here might work...

 

[Will Rickards]

I wonder where the drive letter mapping is stored in windows.
If you imaged drive2 to partition 2 on hd 1, would it pick up the drive letter or not?

I had a similar issue with my Dad's computer when I moved it to a new machine.
Although in this case it was the whole drive letter not just documents and settings.
I ended up editing the registry and changing a bazillion references to the drive letter.
Still had to reinstall some software.

I wonder if you can use one of those boot CD's to change the drive letter.
I would definitely research this one heavily before pulling the trigger.

 

[Piyono]

Hey, I'm *mister* research.

 

[sechs]

Is G a primary partition? If not, then converting to primary and nuking its volume ID might work.

Seems to me that it might be a lot easier to just move documents and settings, however....

 

[Piyono]

It occurs to me that Windows XP will probably not automatically try to reassign D: any more than it would try to reassign the drive letter of any other drive I might pull. Say I disconnected my E:|F: drive. XP wouldn't care. The only noticeable difference would be the addition of E and F to the pool of assignable drive letters.

I figure it would be much the same with drive D, except that XP won't be able to boot because all the user data is on that drive. What I think will happen is that XP will create a 'Documents and Settings' folder in the root of C:.

I think I'm gonna try this in VirtualBox and see what happens.

 

[Bozo]

I believe you can change the drive letter before you reboot. You will get a warning the some files will not be accessable blah, blah, blah. Leave the failing drive in and give it the new drive Ds old drive letter. A drive letter swap. Reboot.
Make a backup of your system first, just in case.

 

[Piyono]

I'll try that.
I just happen to be playing with a VM in which I've set up the virtual drive configuration much like my real drive configuration. Will report back.

 

[Piyono]

The VM drive letter swap seems to have worked.
When I removed the letter from drive D Windows warned me that it wouldn't be available until after a reboot because the drive was still in use.
Naturally, when I rebooted, Windows couldn't find the Docs n' Settings folder because there wasn't a D drive anymore, and I was greeted with a dialog box informing me that a temporary profile was being created. This took a few minutes.
Once XP was all booted up I changed drive G to D and the former D to G and rebooted again. Windows booted up without a hitch so I messed around for a while, opening and closing apps and surfing the web a bit.

This was on a VM with no software installed, of course, but the operation went smoothly enough that I think I'm ready to try it on my real system.

Wish me luck.

 

[Piyono]

The good news:
The drive letter swap worked.

The bad news:
I destroyed my data on that drive.

Narrative short version:
Don't perform life-or-death procedures when you're groggy from lack of sleep and nodding off at the keyboard.

Narrative long version:
You'll notice that in my original post I only listed two partitions for drive one. In fact it had two more empty partitions which I had once set aside for installing Vista and Ubuntu. I decided last night, however to integrate that space into what is now D:, so I booted into my favorite partition editor, Parted Magic and commenced restructuring.

This is a process I have performed countless times before, but apparently not while falling asleep. It was past 2 am and I was *tired*. I didn't want to fall asleep yet so I entertained myself by playing guitar on my front steps for the duration of the process. After about an hour I came back in to check the status; zonked out of my gourd, mind you. There was some other software running at the time which I must have found offensive in some way because I felt the need to terminate it. In my bleary-eyed stupor I managed to click the cancel button for the partitioning operation and then right through the "Are you sure?!?!?" "Really?" dialogs that tried to warn me that I was about to do something potentially very bad. It took about three seconds for me to realize what I had done, by which point I was staring in disbelief at the words "Operation cancelled" and little black and yellow exclamation marks next to the partition names.

Oh. Crap.

I immediately powered down, popped the drive out of that box and into another box on which I fired up Get Data Back NTFS. Then I went to sleep. This morning I came down and had a look at GDB's findings. It seems to have found a lot of the structure but so far everything I've tried to restore is corrupt. I'm trying other recovery programs but I'm not holding my breath.

Thankfully none of the data on this drive was crucial... to me— most of it belonged to other people.

Yeah, I f#cked up.

*sigh*

 

[Piyono]

Yep. I just tried again with Recuva and I'm getting the same thing: all the files appear to the software to be undeleted and intact but the vast majority are corrupt.

איזה בסה!!!!!
לעזאזל!!!

גם זו לטובה.

 

[ddrueding]

Ugh, that sucks. I'm getting better at realizing that I'm too tired and doing more harm than good.

 

[Stereodude]

You don't have a backup? :erm:

 

[Piyono]

You don't have a backup? :erm:

It sort of *was* the backup.
Like I said, none of the data was mine, really.

Some 60 or 70 GB was consumed by my Dad's photos of which he has a copy in Toronto (he says, he's missing some but I think he could be mistaken).

Another big chunk was a system and data drive I backed up for a friend while he smashed his laptop to bits. He says he wasn't particularly attached to any of it and accepts the loss as an act of big-picture serendipity ("this, too, is for the good"). גם זו לטובה

The rest was stuff like my data files for Forté Agent and my download folder, which contained nothing I can't just download again (no bandwidth caps here in Israel).

Of course, there was the Docs n' Settings stuff, but that was an hours-old clone from the other drive.

The big let-down for me, here, is not so much loss of data as it is the recognition of my own incompetence. I'm still giving myself a hard time over how careless I was.

With time and counseling I'll learn to forgive myself, I'm sure. Until then I'm opening the floor to your derision.

 

[Piyono]

I just went through the rest of the recovered data and what's interesting is that primarily the CR2 files were corrupted. Most other files are intact.

Weird.

 

[Bozo]

I think we all have "Been there, Done that" at least once. I know I have on a couple of occasions.
Don't worry about it. :smile: