Changing Boot Drive Letter
bobmac
Controller.
I used their included software....Data Lifeguard Tools to copy the old disk,
the System is booting from the new drive (F: master), but all files are
pointing to the (C: slave) drive, which is the older smaller drive, the new
drive is listed as F in My Computer. I attempted to change the drive
letters, but the Disk Management in Administrative tools will not let me
change them. It will not allow me to change the F drive because its the boot
drive, and will not allow me to change the C drive because of a pagefile.
I had attempted to change F to R then wanted to change C to F, then R to C,
so that the drive letters would be reversed.
Any way to accomplish this...C & F are still identical images.
Thanks
Paul Busby
If I'm understanding you correctly, you now have 2 active partitions, one on
each disc. The assignment of drive letters is given to active partitions 1st
then the remaining partitions on the primary master, then the 2nd disc, then
other devices. Having a 2nd active partition will grab a drive letter
normally assigned to the primary drive. I can't remember if it's possible to
remove an active partition without reformatting the whole disc or not. My
2nd WD1000JB has an extended partition containing 6 logical volumes from I
to N with my DVD as Z, burner as Y & camera as X.
The pagefile can be off the C partition as long as you don't need a complete
memory dump where the min size has to be 1.5x the RAM. I've left a pagefile
on my C drive with a small enough min size that it never gets created. If my
2nd WD goes belly up, my main pagefile would become inaccessible & the one
on my C drive would spring into life. XP can change all drive letters apart
from the boot & OS partition. I once used Drive Mapper which is part of
Partition Magic to get around a similar problem & much to my amazement, it
did exactly what it said on the tin!
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bobmac
think I will use Ghost to image the old drive to an external one, then
change the letters with Magic, and once I think everything is working ok,
format the old drive and use it as a backup.
Thanks again
Bob
"Paul Busby" <m...@privacy.net> wrote in message
news:3e23f99c$0$157$65c6...@mercury.nildram.net...
Paul Busby
> Thanks, I have ordered Partition Magic, and will proceed from there.
> I think I will use Ghost to image the old drive to an external one,
> then change the letters with Magic, and once I think everything is
> working ok, format the old drive and use it as a backup.
> Thanks again
> Bob
Purchase Partition Magic by all means but many have reported that it stuffed
their system & just because Drive Mapper worked for me once, may mean I was
lucky. If you use Partition Magic to move or resize volumes, I'd do it from
the floppies. The most troublesome manoeuvre seems to be merging NTFS
partitions. If you have an external drive why not copy across (straight copy
of files/folders, *not* using Ghost) then reformat your older drive with one
extended partition containing any number of logical volumes. I use Drive
Image rather than Ghost though either are about the most useful piece of
maintenance s/w you can have. Hope it goes smoothly which ever way you go
about it.
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bobmac
article #223188. This article shows how to edit your registry to change
drive letters. It also has links to how to back-up the registry prior to
tinkering with it. It also has a link telling you how to install the backup
utility that comes with XP, but does not install automatically.
The only irony with changing the drive letters was that I lost about three
days of posts to the group (they stayed on the old C drive)...so I don't
know if someone updated this response or not..
Thanks for the help
Bob
"bobmac" <0bobm...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:u6GdnT1D9v3...@comcast.com...
Paul Busby
> Since posting this, I further searched, and found Microsoft Knowledge
> Base article #223188. This article shows how to edit your registry
> to change drive letters. It also has links to how to back-up the
> registry prior to tinkering with it. It also has a link telling you
> how to install the backup utility that comes with XP, but does not
> install automatically.
>
> The only irony with changing the drive letters was that I lost about
> three days of posts to the group (they stayed on the old C
> drive)...so I don't know if someone updated this response or not..
> Thanks for the help
Heaven knows why MS chose to not include it in the installation as with the
Pro version. I remember that article now, linked from a thread here some
time ago & noted the warnings. hopefully, you won't suffer any further
consequences.
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