Move Partitions Around on Vista Without Destroying It

One of the cool things about Vista is its ability to resize partitions using diskmgmt.msc. This trick
works great for those times when you need to shrink or grow a partition. Unfortunately, if you need
to move things around as I did this weekend, you won’t be able to use the built-in tool.
I needed to delete a partition I wasn’t using and also give more space to my Vista partition. So I
turned to the trusty Gparted (gparted.sourceforge.net), a free alternative to tools like Partition
Magic. (Partition Magic doesn’t work in Vista, by the way.) It performed the partitioning fl awlessly,
but Vista refused to boot after that. I was prepared for that, thanks to the Gparted Vista HOWTO
(gparted.free.fr/screenshots/VISTA/Howto_move_VISTA.html), and had my Vista boot DVD ready
to perform the post-Gparted operation:
Boot up the installation DVD
Choose the repair option
Let the installation DVD repair the disk automatically when prompted to do so.

This process let Vista boot, but there was still a problem . . . one that I remember from messing up
drive letter assignments in previous versions of Windows: Vista booted up and took me to the login
screen, but wouldn’t show my desktop. (In theory, the HOWTO should have worked perfectly, but I
have a dual-boot Vista/XP system, and things got confused.)
So I had to do one more set of tasks:
Log in
Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to get Task Manager to appear (the desktop will not appear normally when the
drive letter is messed up)
Use Task Manager to run Regedit and make my way to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\
MountedDevices and fi x the drive letter assignments.
The drive letter assignments can be tricky, because you probably need to do something like rename
\DosDevices\C: to \DosDevices\D: and vice versa, but you can’t have duplicate names, so you’ll
need to change one of them to something temporary, like:
\DosDevices\C: to \DosDevices\X:
\DosDevices\D: to \DosDevices\C:
\DosDevices\X: to \DosDevices\D:
Once rebooted, and all was right with the world!