Hard disk with no drive letter

I don't know whether it's relevant or not but I found an
article on the Microsoft Knowledge Base (#330140)
pertaining to the symptoms I am experiencing. It's to do
with Roxio Go Back (Norton System Works) which modifies
the master boot record.....Unsure as yet how to proceed
but I'm on the case
-----Original Message-----
I am also posting this message under a new topic in this
forum in hopes of a quick response.

I have a similar problem. Windows XP Pro, SP1.

My Western Digital 180 Gig HDD failed, partially, and I
recieved a replacement drive via an advance ship RMA.
My
system partition and one of the extended volumes are
formated NTFS. The third partition is presently FAT32.

I used Data Lifeguard tools to do a sector by sector
image
(Similar to Ghost or Driver Image), I ended up with
drive
letter problems.

With mine, the newly imaged drive (hereafter referred to
as Master) was assigned drive letters I (system
Partition), J, & K. The Dying HDD still maintained it's
original drive letters of C, E, & F despite being
connected as a slave.

I opened disk manager and assigned the slave drive E & F
partitions new drive letters (Y & Z) then removed the
pagefile from C. After rebooting, I assigned Drive
letters E & F to J & K. So far, so good. Here's where
the problems began.

When I changed the drive letter C to X (to make C
available to the new HDD) and rebooted, Windows XP was
unable to access the registration information and would
not allow me to log in. I tried to replace the MBR 1st,
but this did not help. I was afraid to replace the
entire
boot record from thew management console because of a
warning about non-standard partitions and the
possibility
of making all volumes innaccessible. I had to run the
Data Lifeguard tools again in order to copy the I
partition on the master back over the former C partition
on the slave. This permitted me to access the OS again.

Next, I ran XP setup from the OS while it was
accessible.
When the system rebooted for the 1st time, I powered off
and disconnected the slave drive, then resumed setup.
Setup completed successfully, and I could now access the
OS from the new drive exclusively. So far, so good.

The remaining problem, however, is that my system
partition remains named "I." I am unable to change the
drive letter because it is the System partition which is
in use.

Can anyone suggest how to correct this problem? I have
the follwing tools available:

Ghost, Data LifeGuard tools, Partition Magic 8, and NTFS
Pro (which allows me to mount the NTFS Volumes from a
dos
boot disk and run DOS commands, much like the recovery
Console.

I still have the old drive (Slave) although it does
experience intermittent read errors. I really want to
end
up with the system partition as C, not I. At this time
I
am unable to access many programs that refer to the C
drive.

Thanks in advance.

-----Original Message-----
I recently had the unfortunate experience of primary
hard
disk failure. I use the primary for the OS and all
software. Replaced the primary and installed XP.

My secondary hard drive contains all my data. This is
recognised in BIOS, appears in Disk Management but is
not
assigned a drive letter and you can't give it one as
the
option to do this is greyed out - the only available
options are to delete or help.

My former system was up to XP SP1 with probably all the
upgrades installed.

I've tried all the IDE channel configurations,
troubleshooters, knowledge base, help files and can't
find the problem.

There was nothing wrong with it before?
.

.