Fixing tons of broken shortcuts when drive letter changes

Does anyone have experience with trying to remedy this automatically? Say I have several old installations sitting around and they simply need a new drive letter and obviously I'm not going to fix them all 1 by 1. They just need the new letter in their paths.

Have you tried using the Disk Management section of the System Administration in the Control Panel? It should do the trick by right-clicking on the drive you want to change and then select the drive letter you want to use.

Well changing the drive letters isn't an option in this case. I want my current main to be C:\ not my old C:\ and so on. Also all my current stuff is locked in so its just creating the opposite problem.

If this was something like an external drive that just needs adjusting then that would work, but this is just old data that all wants to be C:\

I have had some experience when adding a new HD and thereby changed my DVD-Rom letter. In this case I ran regedit and found all occurrences of D: and changed them to E:. That's what worked best for me.

I never use regedit for what you've done, it's easier and faster in the Disk Management section of the Control Panel.

To the OP, are you stating that all the drives are in the same case as the main C drive now? If so, then unplug them and plug them back in one at a time and see what you get.

Also, are all these drives with operating systems installed on them?

Please be more detailed exactly about what is going on and what you're trying to do here.

I'm not sure I understand. I know how to change what drive is assigned to what drive letter but if you actually want the drive letters different, then you end up with the situation the OP mentions of having shortcuts pointing to the wrong drive and needing to fix them. Can Disk Management actually fix all the references to the new drive letter or were you meaning he can set the drive letter to the old reference?

Like TrainableMan says, I can't just 'change the letter' because it wants to be something that I can't switch to (current Windows disk).

Kind of makes me nervous to go this route but I guess so? Are they all filed under some specific name, like I know extension is .lnk

I suppose my best course of action is an advanced find & replace registry editor, I just need to know what I'm looking for in the registry.

Well I had many occurrences throughout the registry but you will sometimes find clusters of them. I'm not sure this will solve all your bad links though; if they aren't in the registry then those would still be an issue.

i faced the same problem , when i rebulid a new system, tons of music shortcus shows "problem with shortcuts" in xp,but in win7 there is not a track automatic fix broken shortcut fuction with the system. what can i do? in xp i can active the Distributed Link Tracking Client service, and regedt32 in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoResolveSearch set to zero, and other two norelovetrack and LinkResolveIgnoreLinkInfo changed it to zero (maybe? not remind) it works. now i search for a solution in win7.

Hi,

I have this problem too, let me explain this in more detail now...

1. I do not want to change the drive letter itself. The drive letters for the drives are exactly perfect and do not need to be changed, via Disk Management or direct Registry modification. I do not want to change C to D or D to C, or anything else.

2. The real problem is that in the old system several shortcuts had been made in the past, and recently a new hard drive has been added to the system. That means the old system had 1 hard drive, the new system has 2.

3. The old system boot drive was "C", with several shortcuts having been made back then. The new system has a new drive "C", and the old drive was changed to "D" during bootup. So far no problems.

4. The problem comes up now that all the shortcuts on "D" point to "C", and since "C" is the new drive with different info on it than the old drive "D", all the shortcuts on drive "D" now point to drive "C" which means they are all dead because "C" has new info on it now.

5. What i would like to do is change all of the shortcuts on drive "D" to point to items on drive "D", not point to drive "C", because all of the required info is now on drive "D". This seems to require making all new shortcuts after searching for the info on drive "D".

6. So the problem has nothing to do with changing the drive letters on the actual drive itself, but in the shortcut .lnk file instead. The shortcut .lnk file contains a path to the file such as:
"C:\MyDirectory\MyFile.txt"
and inside the link file itself i want it to be:
"D:\MyDirectory\MyFile.txt"
so that the old link will now work again as before.

7. There are a lot of shortcuts, not just 1 or 2 or 9 or 10, so it would take a long time and a lot of effort to manually change every single one by hand, which requires searching for every single target file or folder.

I hope this cleared up the question and somebody can find a nice solution :-)