boot - Windows Vista is booting with wrong drive letter

Windows Vista is booting with wrong drive letter. Instead of booting with drive letter C:, it is getting drive letter D: and thus fails to login to a user profile.

This situation happened because I was trying to replace the hard drive:
I took out original hard drive from a computer containing Vista.
Put it into another computer and made a copy of the hard drive onto a new one using some partitioning GUI software.
I put the new hard drive back into the computer that had Vista on it.
When booting, it loads all the way to the login prompt.
When logging in, it hangs there for a while.
When pressing Ctrl + Alt + Del, I am able to launch Task Manager.
From Task Manager I start Explorer.exe.
It loads a temporary profile saying that it will be deleted upon log off.
Looking at the drive letters I see that it is assigned the wrong drive letter.

Start up repair from hard drive fails as RECOVERY partition is missing on this drive.

Tried Start up repair from Vista CD. It does not detect start up problems. The drive shows up correctly as C: in there.
Ran:

bootrec /fixmbr
bootrec /fixboot
bootrec /rebuildbcd
chkdsk C: /f

That did not fix the problem.

Attempted to mess with the BIOS to disable other boot up items. That did not help.

No drive has C: assigned. OS drive gets D:. Memory card drives start with E: and below.

How do I fix the wrong letter assignment upon boot up into Vista?

Solution
Boot into safe mode by pressing F8 during boot.
Log into an account with Administrator privilege.
When "Preparing your desktop..." shows up, press Ctrl + Alt + Del and select Task Manager.
In Task Manager go to File -> New Task (Run...) and type in explorer.exe.
When Explorer loads follow the steps in the Answer to run regedt32.exe, rename devices, and reboot.

Answer

1. Log on as an Administrator (or just run these as the Administrator)


2. Run regedt32.exe


3. Check if Administrators have full control over HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices by right clicking on it and then clicking on Permissions


4. If you don't have Full control then select Allow to gain Full control


5. Run regedit.exe


6. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices


7. Rename \DosDevices\C: to \DosDevices\Z:


8. Rename \DosDevices\D: to \DosDevices\C:


9. Rename \DosDevices\Z: to \DosDevices\D:


10. Reboot