I took an image from G:\ and copied it to H:\ Now, whenever H:\ gets the chance, such as the default installation directory for some new software, it puts up G:\ - eg G:\Program Files\Adobe\etc when it should be H:\Program Files\ Adobe\etc.
Any ideas on how to straighten it out please?

your registry is the prob.. everything in there that relates to install pathes is pointing to G:, because that is where it was originally installed from, it won't be easy to fix it, the only way i can think of is to dump most of the registry to a text file and do a search and replace and overwrite key values, but that's a lot easier said than done

my advice would be to live with it, or reinstall windows and your programs, if windows is on that drive, you may be able to change the drive letter of the volume windows is on to g: and make the other one h:, but i'm not sure if windows would boot that way or not, i don't think it will

In TweakUI under the My Computer tab there is a Special Folder Option for Program Files - you can change that easily enough, especially if the present destination is G:\Program Files\Adobe\etc as you say.

you can do that from tweak ui? wow, i never noticed that before lol

Hope it wasn't on the exam - a hold over from Win 98 I think.

Maybe I should add that you can use the Win95 Powertoys - Send To Any Folder program in Win XP. (sendtox.dll and sendtox.inf)

lol, haven't taken it yet, i take it at 3pm tomorrow, i'm about to install 95 into a virtual pc... it's been sooo long since i've looked at a win9x install

So, I can uncross my fingers till tomorrow then.
Great, makes typing this a lot easier. Do try the 95 Power Toys - a lot simpler that the current addons.

_http://www.annoyances.org/ has a section on win95, I believe. One for each OS up to and including XP.

Thanks for the advice. I've tried Tweak UI from Powertoys but it shows that I'm already using H:\ for Programs. I've done a quick hunt through the registry and see that I have about as many instances of G:\ as of H:\ - in other words it's all a bit of a muddle and I reckon Sephiroth's advice to live with it is probably the way to go. At least it has forced me to be more alert and actually read the screen when doing mundane tasks so I see where stuff is actually going!!

For interest, the only thing that resolutely refused to function from it's new position was Office XP. It tried to reinstall at each boot, then brought up a message to the effect that the OS was not properly configured for the software and filled the events log with error messages - some relating to inability to find G:\ based software and some relating to H:\ based software. I solved that problem by uninstalling and reinstalling - interestingly, I did not lose my activated status despite it being a retail version and activated normally.

As long as everything works - good. I personally install as little as possible on the ROOT drive - makes refomatting a little easier.

I tried Sephiroth's idea of using a text editor to amend the saved registry. Wow! I used Notepad and it took just on 3 hours to change every occurrence of G:\ to H:\. That made my mind up, so I formatted and reinstalled rather than be stuck with such a muddle. A lesson learned for me however - don't image one drive to another unless they're using the same drive letter. Thanks to both of you for the help and advice.

Wouldn't the Drive Mapper in PM8 have helped here?

I'm not sure, but I tend to doubt it. What I hadn't realised until Sephiroth cued me to it, was that every single occurrence in the HKLM hive pointed to the wrong drive! Literally thousands of entries, every single class entry, etc, etc - all screwed! Imho it would take some piece of software to sort that lot out.
The extent of the problem was being masked by both partitions being on the same machine - it looked as though things were relatively OK because applications, services, et al, were actually accessing another partition, the original G:, instead of their parent partition, H:.
I've reinstalled the lot, many happy hours :( , and now everything is smooth and silky. :D

There used to be a nice program around,
called "COA32" ( Change Of Adress ) that did this a real ease in Win9x.
I have used it in W2k as well.
It looks for reg.keys and shortcuts, and you can tell it to
replace "X:/some.place/" to "Y:/some other_place"

Thanks Bearcat, I'll have a hunt for this - just in case! If I find it I'll post it. :rolleyes:

Found it. There's an updated version, COA2, described at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,21277,00.asp
You can't get it from PC Mag without a subscription :( but it is also available at http://www.wlcweb.com/newsletter/software/coa2.zip :)