well, the worst happened and I had to reformat my Hard drive and reinstall Sonar Platinum. I left my separate audio drive and sample drive intact.  The problem is, my new windows installation changed the letters of my drives, making the DVD drive the last in the chain. So to prevent not finding samples and projects, I changed the default folders to reflect the new drive letter assignments. Specifically my original config had the DVD drive as D:, the audio drive was E and Sample drive was F:  Now, the DVD drive is F: and audio is D and Sample is E:  The data is all there, but loading Kontakt samples means I have to manually search for the new drive (the project saves the location, which had a different drive letter. It works, but is a pain to have to reload all the samples for all instruments such as this, and I use a lot of Kontakt instruments and sample libraries.  Worse than that, however, is that when trying to load a project where the original location was E:, it just hangs and eventually crashes without loading it, because although I set my folder prefs to load projects from drive D (the new letter for my audio drive), it won't load. I can load the project by opening windows explorer, finding the file and then double clicking on it. So before this gets to far along, I'm wondering if there's a safe way to re-order the drive assignments without a major catastrophe or losing access to one of my drives in general. I'd like to get the DVD drive back to be D:, then audio E: and Samples F:  There are some utilities in windows system tools that seem to offer this, but it looks tricky, as you can't assign a drive letter to a drive already in use, and I'm afraid that rebooting will cause either my DVD drive to fail to be detected at all (it actually isn't showing up at all unless I put media in the DVD tray) or worse yet not have access to any other drives as well. I haven't even re-installed all my software, VST's, yet, so I will probably continue this before doing anything drastic like this.
But any suggested way that is SAFE to accomplish this would be more than welcome, they would be greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks.

I don't have Kontakt but this sounds like an artificially created NI install problem. I would reassign the drive letters back to what they were for the hard drives and move the DVD to a higher letter if you wish. Gaps in letter assignment do not matter but changing assignments after installing software can be trouble. I suppose Kontakt has a way to fix the path problems but the problem should not have been allowed to happened in the first place.

You can change drive letter assignments in Windows using Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management. Right click on a drive. You can't change it to a letter currently occupied but you can use a temporary swap location obviously.

Actually the problem occurred after I reinstalled windows after reformting the hard drive, not after I installed anything from NI or Sonar, etc.  But if you have a safe method of reassigning the drive letters, I'm all ears....
Thanks

Sanderxpander
You can change drive letter assignments in Windows using Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management. Right click on a drive. You can't change it to a letter currently occupied but you can use a temporary swap location obviously.

  I did see this method, but was nervous about trying it--can you be a trifle more specific about your explanation--in other words, step by step, using a temporary swap location, etc. I'm afraid when I saw the Admin tools method it seemed risky if I did it wrong...and I've already suffered enough the past few days....
 
thanks a lot.

It may look daunting but the procedure is simple. Right-click on a partition or disk (in the case of the DVD) and the context menu permits reassigning drive letters.

Yeah and let's assume you want to swap D and E. Well you can't assign D to E cause E is in use. So make D into F (the temporary swap), now turn E into D and then F into E. Make sense? A reboot is probably required to get everything to work properly but if so, Windows will prompt you.

I understand what you are saying but I still have a question:
 
To restate:  My old drive pattern was C:  boot drive and programs, etc.
D: DVD drive
E: audio drive
F: Samples
 
Now it is:
 
C:  boot drive (same)
D:  audio drive
E:  Samples
F:  DVD drive
 
So it moved the DVD to the end of the chain. If I change the drive letters of D: and E:  what would I change them to to to avoid a drive conflict? Not sure if I could just move everything up one letter (except the C: drive, of course) and if that would fix this issue. 
thanks.

You can get exactly your old order back. Let's take your audio drive as an example. It's now D but you want it to be E, correct?
So you go to the computer management/disk management thing and you try to modify the drive letter from D to E. Windows will complain that this new drive letter is already in use (the sample drive). So first you have to move the sample drive temporarily out of the way. So you modify it and make it S or whatever, something far enough away that you don't have to worry about it. Now E is free. Change audio drive D to E. Now D is free. Change DVD drive to D. Now F is free. Change sample drive back to F. Done.

The only thing you have to be worried about is if you installed any programs on the actual drives you're changing the letter of. That will usually screw something up.

This makes sense to me, I'm going to try this. Thank you for the explanation.