Vista - Phantom CD Drive after reassigning Recovery Partition drive letter

Another annoying Vista mystery.
I just got a new HP Vista desktop -- I already have an HP Vista
laptop.

On both, HP provided a Recovery-Image partition which showed up as
Drive D:. I usually like to reserve D: for a partition in which I put
all my data, separate from the OS and installed programs. So on both
systems, I used Vista's built-in Disk Mangement utility to reassign
the drive letter from D: to Z:. This worked fine on the laptop, but
on the desktop system, I was also left with D: but it now identified
itself as a CD Drive (I only have a single DVD drive, which shows up
as E.

I can't find any way to remove this phantom CD drive and free up the
drive letter D:. I talked to HP tech support, and was informed that
reassigning the Recovery partition to a different letter was the cause
of the problem, and that the ONLY way out of this is to do a recovery
(yes, I did create recovery disks) which wipes the entire 500GB disk
drive, and would force me to reinstall all my apps and restore all my
data. I don't want to do this unless it's absolutely necessary.

If I am to believe HP, there is no way that I can assign D: to any
partition other than the original one set up to hold the recovery
image. But I don't really believe that this is anything other than an
implementation error on HP's part, and am hoping that someone in this
NG can see a way around this problem and help me out.

So, if anyone has any ideas on how to get rid of my phantom CD drive
and free up the drive letter D: that is attached to it, I would be
most grateful.
TIA, Jay.
--
Jay (remove dashes for legal email address)

HP provides an utility with the laptop that will copy the recovery partition
to removeable media (CD/DVD) and remove the partition and it's drive
designation.

When the recovery partition was created the MBR was modified to display the
"Hit F10 to..." at boot.

Changing the drive letter or deleting the partition "normally" does not
remove the modidifed MBR.
Do not understand why HP rep did not inform you correctly.

Also Vista uses Win PE for boot and repair - it is not advisable to use "X"
or "Z" - PE usually reserves "X".

"Jay Somerset" <jay-1941-@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news67om314mklgcqns960bomhoprnc1j6v7c@xxxxxx