Win8.1Pro Scrambled Drive Letters
n years past I multi-booted Win98, Win2k and WinXP, but around a year ago I began booting WinXP only due to motherboard upgrade that only supports WinXP and later Windows. This year I setup dual boot WinXP/Win8.1Pro, and everything worked fine for nearly 4 months until yesterday. While booted to Win8.1 the system locked up; mouse and keyboard stopped working, and the only way to do anything was either the restart or power button. Upon restart "ntloader missing" was given, and I was unable to boot to either OS.
There are 2 physical hard drives that are partitioned into a few partitions with a single primary partition on each drive, and boot to BartPE CD revealed drive letters were scrambled, actually reversed, i.e. drive letters that were on drive 0 are now on drive 1 and drive letters that were on drive 1 are now on drive 0. Win98 is on drive 0 partition 1 which was C drive and is now D drive, WinXP is on drive 1 partition 1 which was D drive and is now C drive, and Win8.1Pro is on drive 0 partition 6 which was I drive and is now N drive. Other partitions contain different kinds of data but are reversed as well, i.e. drive letters that were on drive 0 are now on drive 1 and drive letters that were on drive 1 are on drive 0. To make drive changes more clear drive labels and letters are:
Original/Cprrect Now/Reversed
DRV0_VOL1(C:) DRV1_VOL1(C:)
DRV1_VOL1(D:) DRV0_VOL1(D:)
DRV0_VOL2(E) DRV1_VOL2(E:)
DRV0_VOL3(F:) DRV1_VOL3(F:)
DRV0_VOL4(G:) DRV1_VOL4(G:)
DRV0_VOL5(H:) DRV1_VOL5(H:)
DRV0_VOL6(I:) DRV1_VOL6(I:)
DRV0_VOL7(J:) DRV0_VOL2(J:)
DRV1_VOL2(K:) DRV0_VOL3(K:)
DRV1_VOL3(L:) DRV0_VOL4(L:)
DRV1_VOL4(M:) DRV0_VOL5(M:)
DRV1_VOL5(N:) DRV0_VOL6(N:)
DRV1_VOL6(O:) DRV0_VOL7(O:)
Google searching for solutions on how to change drive letters, results found only tell either reinstall of Windows is needed to fix problems or how to change drive letters within Windows which cant be done in my circumstance because Im unable to boot to Windows. Are there any programs available to create boot CD that can reassign correct drive letters outside of Windows, or is the only solution to reinstall Windows?
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