No, no, not a simple "Use the Drive Manager" problem.

My vista installation was originally on C:; now it thinks it's on E: (for reasons of me trying to dual boot to XP, too convoluted to get into). I backed up my Vista partition before fiddling around; gave up, restored the content of my backup onto the first & now only partition, but Vista still thinks it's E:; which means it boots up but can't find any programs or data at the location it expects (because everything points to C: but it thinks it's on E:).

I've tried GParted, but I don't think it can assign NTFS drive letters. I tried booting with UBCD4Win & using the drive manager; it seemed to successfully re-letter the drive, but when I boot back into vista; Voila, it's E: again.

Are there any other 3rd party tools I can use to hard reassign drive letters for Vista? Do I need to rewrite the MBR or boot sector; can I use the Vista repair console; do I need to reformat my hard drive again? Where does NTFS keep it's drive letter assignments, and does Vista use the same as XP?

Inquiring minds are now desperate to know....

Thanks for any insight or pointers,

Paul

The main question is do you have the XP partition on the same drive as Vista, or are they separate drives?

The problem is usually that if you create an XP partition on a drive that shows up in the BIOS before the Vista drive, then it will sometimes be seen as the first drive, or drive C:

It's really quite a pain when this happens.

You could try running the "Startup Repair" function on the Vista DVD. It can fix many startup problems.