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#WHAT DOES CLEAN DISK SIGNATURE MEAN IN DRIVE SNAPSHOT WINDOWS#Up to and including Windows Vista a separate boot partition with its inherent capacity for drive letter problems was only something that multibooters were likely to encounter. #WHAT DOES CLEAN DISK SIGNATURE MEAN IN DRIVE SNAPSHOT WINDOWS 7#Windows 7 and 8 System Reserved Partition. If anything it makes matters worse because with the decline of optical drives there would have been more occasions where an operating system on a boot partition would have seen itself as the D: drive, thereby making a re-assigning of default letters correct. Every Vista in a dual/multi-boot machine whether on a system or boot partition would be able to see itself as the C: drive, which is a definite improvement, but it does nothing to stop a boot partition operating system being assigned a wrong drive letter after a disk signature change. #WHAT DOES CLEAN DISK SIGNATURE MEAN IN DRIVE SNAPSHOT INSTALL#There was a small change made to drive letter allocation procedures in Windows Vista so that when an install is carried out from bootable media and not from inside a booted Windows operating system the install routines ignore any current letter assignments to existing partitions and allow each added OS to take C: as their drive letter. It means that when a disk signature problem triggers drive letters to be reassigned in the default order of System partition as C: and Boot partition as D: it will be unlikely that an OS on a Boot partition will get its original letter back. ![]() ![]() If you are familiar with the Windows System and Boot partitions and how 2K and XP assigns drive letters then you will know that when you have separate system and boot partitions in a dual or multi-boot setup then the System partition would normally be C: and additional operating systems will be on a Boot partition that could be anything other than C: or the D of the optical drive. #WHAT DOES CLEAN DISK SIGNATURE MEAN IN DRIVE SNAPSHOT HOW TO#How to Recover From a Changed Windows Drive Letter. Windows 2K and XP cannot recover from such a drive letter change, but Vista and 7 are a bit more adaptable and can often struggle to a limited desktop, from where it may be possible to manually edit the registry to restore the original drive letter. This will mean that as Windows continues to boot and starts looking for files such as E:/Documents and Settings or E:\Users\Name the paths will of course now be invalid and files won't be found. If you have a Windows operating system that considers itself to be say the E: drive and a disk signature change causes this assignment to be lost, then during early bootup Windows will reassign drive letters in the default order, which will be the System partition as C: and the Boot partition as D. It is one of the vagaries of a Window's configured dual or multi-boot setup that in certain circumstances a Windows install may be assigned something other than the usual C: for its drive letter. When you are using the Windows built-in bootmanager to dual or multiboot it is vital to maintain drive letters because Windows might not see itself as the default C: drive. ( You will also be informed that new device/s have been installed and a reboot is required). These reassigned letters may not match the originals and so drive letters may change. On first reboot after a signature change each partition on the affected drive will have its unique number updated to match the new disk signature, then be reassigned a drive letter. They no longer match the disk signature of a drive and therefore drive letter assignments are lost. If a disk signature is changed the partition numbers in the registry become invalid. During Windows bootup the stored partition number is compared with the disk signature and if they match then the partition will retain the drive letter that was previously assigned to it. ![]() On a classic MBR styled hard drive this unique partition number is generated from the disk signature of the drive and the sector number that a partition starts on, ( It's different on GPT drives - see box below). With NT operating systems the hard drive partition drive letters are maintained by linking them to a partition by using a unique number that is assigned to each partition and stored in the Windows registry. This differs from the Win9x generation of operating systems where drive letters were assigned on every bootup in a default order as the partitions and drives were discovered, which meant that a change to partitions or the adding or removal of drives would cause drive letters to change. ![]() The Windows NT operating system from before NT4 till Win-8 will remember the drive letter that has previously been allocated to a partition or drive and always reassign that same letter every time the operating system is booted. They are linked to a hard drive's Disk Signature. ![]()
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