I'm in trouble. Due to the (erroneous) mounting and unmounting of a friends hard disk in my system, Windows (2000) suddenly gives my hard disk the label f: and not c: (Meaning that I have no c:). This causes almost all the programs not to work and most configurations are strange. Is there a way to fix this?

In administrative tools you should be able to assign the correct letter to the drive.

Jacko: I've tried that, but I am not allowed to change it since it's the system disk...

I hate to break this to you, but that's officially not possible. I too have had such nightmares. It's unclear why W2K felt compelled to reassign your system drive's letter, but the answer might lie in remounting your friends drive, or something similar. For the OS to consider a drive the system drive, it must be the one with ntldr, boot.ini, and other boot files on it. That doesn't mean it's also the boot drive, as that's just the drive with the WINNT dir on it. Anyway, Microsoft's official answer is a clean reinstall of W2K. Backwards-engineering what caused this might give another answer, but somehow you MUST change the registry settings in the suffering W2K system. I've tried remote registry access with no luck. If you do find a way, please tell me, cause I've never succeeded without a reinstall. Best of luck.

Magnus, I think I figured out a (long-winded) fix. Please let me know if it works or not, as I encounter the same problem from time to time. You'll need your friend's drive back, or any other drive formatted for FAT or NTFS. If this "temporary" drive doesn't have some flavor of Windows on it, you'll need to copy the boot files mentioned below, ahead of time. You must install the drive on your Primary bus' ribbon cable, and set its jumpers to be the Master. That makes it the System volume (normally C:, and always C: on Win9x/Me). While doing that, remove all other hard drives, CD-Roms, etc., except the temp one you just added, and your "F:" drive. Make sure your "F:" drive is on the Secondary bus' ribbon cable, and jumpered as a Master too (it probably is). Now, boot into the operating system on the temporary drive, and copy the files mentioned below (if you pre-copied those files, boot straight into your own W2K). Copy the following files from your "F:" drive's root directory, to the root dir of the temp drive: ntldr boot.ini ntdetect.com NTBOOTDD.SYS (if your sys uses it) You can delete these when you're done, but for now, open the boot.ini file that's now on the temp drive, and ADD the following line under the "[operating systems]" section (without the quotes): "scsi(0)disk(1)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows 2K, on 'F:' drive" /fastdetect" Don't worry if your original entry starts with "multi(0)" instead of "scsi(0)", either will work. If you're not in your own W2K system yet, reboot into it, by selecting the boot.ini entry you added. In your Administrative Disk Manager, your "F:" drive should no longer be considered the system volume, and the temp drive should be right now (and possibly labelled "C:"). This is good (assuming it works), as it "breaks the mold" of your system thinking your original drive is the system volume, previously known as "F:". After all is done, the sys will have to rethink where the system volume is, and what letter to assign it. It will default to "C:", as long as no other still-existing drive is labelled "C:" (why you removed other drives), it has the boot files (which your original drive still does), and it becomes the primary bootup drive (system drive). OK, so now shut down and remove the temp drive. MAKE SURE you reconnect your "F:" drive to the Primary ribbon cable, and keep it jumpered as master. NO other drives should be on either ribbon (you can leave the floppy). Reboot, and the system should re-assign your drive as "C:", and consider it the system volume. At least, that's the theory. If so, you can now add your other drives/CD-ROMs back, but don't move your "formerly F:" drive! I hope you can try this, and that it works. It's not dangerous.

Jeff, thanks a lot for taking your time. However, I was able to solve the problem with information in this article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q223188 Maybe it can help you too! /Magnus

Thanks! Without Microsoft's confirmation in that article, I doubt I would ever had the nerve to try such a delicate registry editing procedure. Ironic that I wound-up being the one helped!