Windows 10: Determine the former drive letter assignments on an old boot drive

Is it possible to discover the previous drive letter assignments on an old boot drive?

I have a Windows 7 boot drive that previously was part of a system with 8 hard drives. I cloned the boot drive from this system and moved to a newer system, on which I've since done an "upgrade in place" to Windows 10 Pro. I have some software that expects the drive letters be the same as the old system (in order to find certain resources.) Ideally I would like to simply change the drive letters in the new system to match the drive letters in the old system, unfortunately, I don't remember exactly what those are. So ... instead of testing a bunch of different letter assignments, I was hoping this information might still be available on the original boot drive. Any help is appreciated.

:)

 

Blue question mark over drive

If you click, change Drive Letter and Paths, can you assign a drive letter to that partition?

If so, assign drive letter W, since that was its original Drive Letter . . .

 

Unable to assign drive letter to SSD partition

Hi,

Depending upon the number of partition and connected hardware devices Windows assigns a drive letter with which the drive is referenced. Windows uses
MountMgr to manage drive letters. MountMgr will assign the next available drive letter to each device added, regardless of type. With the system drive assigned the letter C:, there may be other IDE, SATA or USB devices, such
as a DVD ROM or a Flash drive assigned to letters D: and E:. When adding another drive, Windows will assign the next drive letter available, which in this case would be drive letter H:

Drive letters can usually be manually changed using Disk Management, however there may be some exceptions. In your case, the drive letter C was already used by other drive therefore drive assigned by Windows 10 Technical Preview.

Let us know if you have any other queries.

 

Welcome to the forum. The only way I can think of is look at the software either in a config file or registry searching the reg for the software should then tell you the drive I assume you know the folders for the software. You may only need to do it a couple of times

 

In addition this may be of some use ... windows - Get a list of drive letters and types from the registry - Super User it's from Win7/8 time but Microsoft rarely change the locations in the registry

 

Thank you to those who offered pertinent suggestions. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices doesn't show the hard drive letters in a human readable format. Searching the registry for references to the old drive letters didn't yield the results I was looking for but it did lead me to resource files on the C: drive which contained references to the old drive letters. A couple of drive letter swaps and now everything seems to be cool. Much thanks!!

 

Now you've done an in-place upgrade, the registry entry for MountedDevices will reflect the current status quo.

If you can examine the key held within the registry hives of the the cloned copy, if mounted, it will show the drive mounts as they were.

 

Another direction of a method you can keep in mind for future reference, (assuming it applies): If you remember creating any shortcuts in that hard drive to programs that are also within that hard drive? Open that drive in File Explorer and search for: *.LNK
If it finds any .lnk files, right click > Properties. See where the original location is of that file.