I wonder if someone here could help me. I have a triple bootXP, Vista 32 and Win 7 beta, I have mainly been using XP and Win 7. All been working fine until I went on Vista to defrag it's drive and discovered it is not C anymore. I can login fine, but it keeps installing updates in a loop.Can you repair Vista like XP, I put the vista disk in the drive but it didn't come up with the option like XP to overwrite the OS whilst still maintaining yourfiles.The Vista was originally installed through XP although being a custom install on a seperate drive. I don't mind completely reinstalling Vista again, but I'mnervous that it will upset the boot menu of XP and win 7.Ihave 1. XP on C: partition 116 gigD: Games & Utilities seperate drive 200gig.( E: Vista seperate drive partition 48.8 gig. F:Games 48.8 gig. G:Music 48.8gig. H: Data 43.4gig.) 2 Win 7 on I: partition 116gig J: Video 116gig. K: Utilities 116 gig. This is the order now viewed from Vista.Underlined and( ) are seperate drives in their partitionsI am a novice of Vista, but I will continue looking, I'm just hoping someone with more brains has an easy solution.I did do a search for this problem but there wasn't an answer, unless I searched in the wrong area.Thanking in Advance.Sandy.

Vista won't let you change the letter of either the "Boot Volume" or the "System Volume" in Disk Manager. Nor will the command line utility diskpart.You can, however, edit the registry to change them. Make sure to backup the registry first, or at least the key in question. Open the registry with regedit.exe. Go to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices. Right click on each value you want to change and select Rename. They willbe the ones that havenames such as \DosDevices\C:, \DosDevices\D: etc. Rename using another letter. You may have to rename some values twice, using an intermediate value. Close regedit and reboot. After reboot, the volume mount point letters should have changed.The usual warnings and disclaimers about editing the registry apply.

HiIf you load andlog-in to vista, system drive letter is not C, is this what you say?

I am sorry Sandy, but your post is a little ambiguous. Drive letters are a function of the OS that is booted. If booted into XP, then the partition that holds XPs Windows directory, %windir%, will be the C drive; however, the partitions and drives that house the other operating systems will have differing drive letters. Likewise, when you are booted into Vista, the partition that holds Vistas Windows directory, %windir%, will be the C drive. The same goes for Windows 7. The assignment of drive letters is not persistent across operating system. In your case, it can be even harder as you have partitions of the same size with Vista and Windows 7 on 116GB partitions. Which is which when you are looking from XP? This is one of the reasons that you should not necessarily rely on drive letters when you multi-boot. Assign your partitions and drives a label. Drive/partition labels ARE persistent across multiple OS installations and can help you easily identify when partition is which regardless of the assigned drive letter. To assign a drive letter, right-click Computer and select manage. Acknowledge the UAC prompt and then select Disk Management. Right-click the partition in question (making sure you are actually doing the right one) and assign a name in the empty field towards the top of the General Tab. In short, if your Vista is booting okay, dont do anything. Trying to fix a problem that may not be a problem may cause a real problem (sorry for all of the problems). While you are booted into Vista, open up a command prompt by typing cmd in the Start Menu search dialog box. What drive letter is shown there?

Hi,Thank you for your replies. Sorry if I wasn't clear with my question.Ventsislav when I am in Vista which is on a seperate SataDrive, The O S doesn't see itself as C when it did and should.Windows XP and win7 are on the same drive Darien, on 116gig partitions,Vista is on another drive, when I login these view theirselves correctly Vista has now installed it's updates, it has stopped looping, but Vista still has the view as above question. It's working there's a little shield icon and it's E: Vista.All my drives are labled and have drive letters. I had to assign a letter to my XP when I first installed win 7 I just had that labled Win XP.Everything has been okay till this problem, on hindsight I should have put another drive in for win 7.Darien I think I will listen to you and leave it as is, I was really wondering how this happened in the first place. I will do as said next in Vista I will do the command prompt cmd and see what drive letter is shown and will post the result here.Thank you all for your time in helping me, I'm getting a few bugs in win 7 64, but I personally like it, to me it looks likea speedier Vista. I bought Vistawhen I built this machine,but I haven't had it installed long, so really I'm testing Vista 32 and win 7 64 I prefer Win 7.Regards Sandy.

Hi,Darien, I am in Vista now and did as you said it said E:\Users\Sandy, I have done a screen shot but cannot see anyway to insert.I'm just a bit worried if somehow the view is mixed up in Vista, what else strange can happen, at the end of it I have OS disks so I just have to reinstall.A lot of home users have dual boots eg: a lot of banks don't support the new explorers. Or their favourite games aren't supported in the new OS. So I'llhave to keep exploring and see what happens next.Thank you again for your time and help.Regards Sandy.

If everything is working fine, then your %windir% directory must have been assigned the letter E. There is nothing inherently wrong with thatespecially if all is working well. I hate to ask you to do another thing, but at the command prompt type echo %windir%. After that type echo %systemdrive%. You should see, in your case, E:\Windows and E: respectively. As long as the environment variables are pointing to the right place and Vista is working fine, dont worry. But you are justified in investigating what you believe to be an anomaly.

I did as you said Darien and it's all pointing in the right direction, thank you so much. This happened to Vista since installing Win 7 so I needed to try and find out why.It's good you people are here with more knowledge, it's good you share it.Regards Sandy.