Win8.1Pro Drive Letters Scrambled

[bevills1]

In years past I multi-booted Win98, Win2k and WinXP, but around a year ago I began booting WinXP only due to motherboard upgrade that only supports WinXP and later Windows. This year I setup dual boot WinXP/Win8.1Pro, and everything worked fine for nearly 4 months until yesterday. While booted to Win8.1 the system locked up; mouse and keyboard stopped working, and the only way to do anything was either the restart or power button. Upon restart "ntloader missing" was given, and I was unable to boot to either OS.

There are 2 physical hard drives that are partitioned into a few partitions with a single primary partition on each drive, and boot to BartPE CD revealed drive letters were scrambled, actually reversed, i.e. drive letters that were on drive 0 are now on drive 1 and drive letters that were on drive 1 are now on drive 0. Win98 is on drive 0 partition 1 which was C drive and is now D drive, WinXP is on drive 1 partition 1 which was D drive and is now C drive, and Win8.1Pro is on drive 0 partition 6 which was I drive and is now N drive. Other partitions contain different kinds of data but are reversed as well, i.e. drive letters that were on drive 0 are now on drive 1 and drive letters that were on drive 1 are on drive 0. To make drive changes more clear drive labels and letters are:
Original/Cprrect Now/Reversed
DRV0_VOL1(C:) DRV1_VOL1(C:)
DRV1_VOL1(D:) DRV0_VOL1(D:)
DRV0_VOL2(E) DRV1_VOL2(E:)
DRV0_VOL3(F:) DRV1_VOL3(F:)
DRV0_VOL4(G:) DRV1_VOL4(G:)
DRV0_VOL5(H:) DRV1_VOL5(H:)
DRV0_VOL6(I:) DRV1_VOL6(I:)
DRV0_VOL7(J:) DRV0_VOL2(J:)
DRV1_VOL2(K:) DRV0_VOL3(K:)
DRV1_VOL3(L:) DRV0_VOL4(L:)
DRV1_VOL4(M:) DRV0_VOL5(M:)
DRV1_VOL5(N:) DRV0_VOL6(N:)
DRV1_VOL6(O:) DRV0_VOL7(O:)
Google searching for solutions on how to change drive letters, results found only tell either reinstall of Windows is needed to fix problems or how to change drive letters within Windows which can’t be done in my circumstance because I’m unable to boot to Windows. Are there any programs available to create boot CD that can reassign correct drive letters outside of Windows, or is the only solution to reinstall Windows?

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[DB83]

'ntloader missing' is possibly due to the fact that windows is looking at the wrong disk volume.

But I doubt you can simply change volumes to get the correct boot options.

You might not need to completely reinstall windows. Boot from the install disk and look carefully at the options available. I know zilch about Win 8.1 but Win7 does have install options for 'repair' and that, atleast. may allow you to boot in to 8.1 with the multi-boot to XP following on.

My multi-boot Win7/XP followed that scenario.

[johns0]

Go into your motherboard bios and change the boot order,then when in windows you can change the drive letters.

[bevills1]

'ntloader missing' is possibly due to the fact that windows is looking at the wrong disk volume.

But I doubt you can simply change volumes to get the correct boot options.

You might not need to completely reinstall windows. Boot from the install disk and look carefully at the options available. I know zilch about Win 8.1 but Win7 does have install options for 'repair' and that, atleast. may allow you to boot in to 8.1 with the multi-boot to XP following on.

My multi-boot Win7/XP followed that scenario.

Totally agree. Boot.ini and other boot files are on Drive 0 partition 1 which is now Drive D and should be Drive C where the system looks for boot files, and the OS files are on all incorrect drive letters due to the reversal of drive letter assignments. What needs to be done is to reassign all drive letters the way they were originally/correctly assigned. I'll try boot to Win8.1Pro install DVD and see if there's an option to correctly assign drive letters.

[bevills1]

Well this morning the PC booted normally when a friend turned it on, but it's back to the scrambled drive letters this afternoon and will not boot. I'm beginning to suspect something's screwy with either the Win8 boot loader or the BIOS. Any ideas?

[DB83]

Did your friend boot in any particular way such as 'Safe Mode' ?

[bevills1]

No, she just turned on the PC, and it booted normally. Checking further I found the BIOS had set Drive1 as the first bootable hard drive and Drive0 as the second bootable hard drive. Changing it back to Drive0 as the first bootable hard drive it boots normally as it has for 3 months plus until the problem began. Now the question is what could cause this seemingly random BIOS setting change? Is Win8 or its boot loader capable of doing this, or is there maybe a problem in the BIOS itself?

[KidVid]

I suspect the problem is the CMOS battery.

[johns0]

Ya,check the time when you can boot into windows and see if it's on time.

[bevills1]

Correct time is shown on boot to Windows.

[bevills1]

Evidence now seems to point to a memory issue. Just before the problem started I had installed some ddr3 1600 memory which my Asrock H77M motherboard is supposed to support. However, this memory was running at 1333 with no option to set it to 1600 in the bios. I swapped out the 1600 memory for 1333 memory, and all is well for the past few days.

[DB83]

Interesting.

When I upgraded this PC a year ago, I had a conflicting memory issue but that caused the system to crash after some minutes from boot (there is a thread on here started by me on this)

That 1600 memory could have been in the wrong slots but if your other memory was not rated at 1600 it should, as it did, time as 1333. But I guess that memory was simply incompatable PERIOD for your mb.