Drive letter changed?

[Pault543]

I have a MacBook Pro and have been running Windows XP Pro SP2 on it for some time, using BootCamp.

I also have the rEFIt boot manager. Windows has always shown its own Partition as C: (and obviously no others show up from Windows). I didn't add or change any partitions...its all exactly as Boot Camp made it. My Windows partition is FAT32 32GB.

 

I recently received an external hard drive and decided to install Linux Fedora Core 6 on it, with the external HD plugged in via USB. During the setup, I unticked my laptop's hard drive so that only my external hard drive was selected and then continued to make an ext3 partition for it (20GB). I also ticked the box to install the G....something or other bootloader on the selected hard disk, which was probably pointless.

 

Upon restarting, Linux didnt start...but this wasn't terrible. However, when loading into windows (from my laptop's hard disk) I got a BSoD saying Session Manager Error.

 

Using the Windows XP CD and choosing to install windows shows my hard drive config as:

C: Partition 1 [unknown] 200MB (200MB free)

E: Partition 2 [unknown] 62464MB (62464 free)

Unpartitioned space 128MB

F: Partition 3 [FAT32] 32604MB (11202 MB free)

 

I can also see that all my files are intact on F: using the recovery console.

 

So basically it looks like my windows partition is being assigned letter F: instead of letter C:

and this situation matches a possible cause for the "Session Manager" error.

The problem is, I really don't know how to change it back. :censored2:

 

(I feel that this probably can't be fixed via windows and instead must be something to do with the whole EFI boot system which I have no experience with. I do have access to the rEFIt console (part of the boot loader I guess) and I have tried resetting all the drive mappings using something like "map -r" but this didnt seem to make any difference.)

[Metrogirl]

The source of your problem is probably the GRUB boot manager you allowed to be installed as part of your Fedora installation. GRUB isn't fussy, it makes changes to all the hard drives it can see, selected or not. My guess is that it's written its own code to your internal hard drive and is expecting to see the external drive at boot time so it can run and give you a choice as to what you want to load. I might be totally wrong of course because I'm not an expert in GRUB but there is a ton of stuff about it if you Google for it including some problems which sound quite similar to yours.

[Chad Killingsworth]

Drive letter assignments in the Windows Recovery Console are not necessarily the same as the assignments when in Windows.

[Pault543]

I've found that after using Boot Camp, the 3rd partition should show up as C: and this is decribed in many Boot Camp tutorials, including official ones i believe.

http://static.flickr.com/46/124152337_d75f22de5c_o.jpg

 

Either way, I'm pretty sure partition 3 used to show up as C: so something has changed.

 

The GRUB boot manager could be the problem...although the error message is a windows one, so Windows has started to boot. Anyone know how to check if GRUB is installed?

 

EDIT: also, I did in fact plug the hard drive in again straight away after it failed via Firewire and then try and boot from that. Nothing really happened, but it continued to load Windows and gave me the "Session Manager" error (which was the first time I saw it).

[elviejo]

Google for supergrub, download and boot from it, after some clicks you go in the GUI, choose windows and make a repair of your mbr, basically what the program do is desinstall the grub loader and restore the mbr you have before. Good luck.

[Pault543]

I tried Supergrub...froze on "loading Stage 2..."

 

I still feel like GRUB probably isnt installed on my laptop's hard disk but if there any definite way to find out then I'll try it.

 

I more want to find out how drive letter assignment works on macs in legacy OSs, and how Boot Camp can make Partition 3 appear as C: