WinXP: Change drive letter assigments

Today I had a problem with the letters that were assigned to disks. I bought a new disc, copied under Knoppix the content of the old disc to the new one, booted from the new one - however the old disc still had letter C assigned and the new one D. Moreover it was not possible to change the assignments via GUI (Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Disc Management).

Fortunately I found a way to succed -> namely via registry update. It seems that WinXP stores the assignments in the special place in the registry. One can easily modify it by using the regedit utility and modify the keys as shown on the attached picture (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices)

Exact procedure (D is the boot drive on C the pagefile is located) is as follows:

1. Do a full backup of the registry

2. Run the regedit and go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

3. Rename the \DosDevices\C: to something like \DosDevices\Z:

4. Rename the \DosDevices\D: to \DosDevices\C:

5. Rename the \DosDevices\Z: to \DosDevices\D:

6. Exit regedit and reboot the system

It worked in my case!