freedom wroteI recently had my computer updated and a new motherboard, cpu and hard drive was added to my existing system and consequently many of my applications are not registered correctly.
Is there ANY registry software (hopefully Macecraft) that will repair the registry by replacing the invalid entries with the new drive letters? ...
Power Tools Registry Find and Replace can do mass registry changes of text strings.
Your problem sounds like a variation of the situation described in this Microsoft article.
Do a google search for "change boot drive letter" -- you will see you have lots of company.
Including me. Just last Monday, I received a windows balloon message saying I had a delayed write error on the C:\ drive's $mft with data lost, followed by a BSOD referencing NTFS. Thereafter on rebooting, windows would start but hung just short of the "Welcome" screen (even in safe mode). After confirming in various ways that the files on the volume were OK, I did a repair reinstall of XP Pro to the volume.
Windows then would come up all the way, but the boot partition was assigned to G:\. Power Tools Registry Cleaner showed nearly 6000 "does not exist errors" before I stopped it. These were of course all the files registered to C:\. In other words, the registry was correct, but the mounted volume letter was wrong! I was nervous about doing a mass change of thousands of registry entries, though Power Tools can do that. I decided first to try an alternate approach ... and prefer the boot volume to be on C:\, not some other letter.
Since I had installed a second SATA harddisk about a year ago, I disconnected it per the above referenced article and redid the repair reinstall of XP Pro. This did not correct the problem! The boot volume was still assigned to G:\. There was no C:\.
I then tried the technique described here. And shut down immediately after doing the registry hack. Then I did a third repair reinstall of XP Pro -- to update the drive letter in many shortcuts. That solved my problem. The boot was assigned to C:\. After I reconnected the other harddisk and let windows update do its thing, all applications worked normally -- none had to be reinstalled.
I don't know if my experience will be worth considering in your situation.
Here's a summary of your main options as I see it:
- 1. Use PT Registry Find and Replace. Choose to backup. Hold your breath. Your boot volume will not be C:\.
2. Hack the registry per this Microsoft article, or this simpler procedure. Your boot volume will be C:\.
3. Swap the harddisk cables (one end only). May work, I did not try it, but is worth a try. Your boot volume might be C:\.
Good luck!
Warning: If doing the mass change with PT Registry Find and Replace, certain items should be skipped using the Ignore tab. One example is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices. There might be others ...
