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making the d drive the c drive

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nealric

Member
Joined
Sep 9, 2002
Location
under the floorboards
I recently upgraded to a much faster and much bigger hard drive (old 80gb pata 7200rpm 2mb cache to 250gb diamondmax10 16mb cache sata)

I low level copied the partition over so that the two drives have identical data, and windows is now sucessfuly booting from the new drive. However, tis still the D drive. I want to make it the C drive because right now, all the programs are installed to "c" and therefore running off c, thus negating 1/2 the purpose of the faster drive.

If I simply disable the C drive, windows hangs on booting- on the welcome screen- I get a mouse but no gui.

Help?
 
the only way you are going to get it to be "C" drive is to reinstall windows. Once the windows drive sees itself as a certain drive letter, it is LOCKED into that letter until you reformat.
 
TollhouseFrank said:
the only way you are going to get it to be "C" drive is to reinstall windows. Once the windows drive sees itself as a certain drive letter, it is LOCKED into that letter until you reformat.

This is FALSE, you don't have to reformat. Ok go to start - Accessories and then administrative tools - then computer management then go to storage - and then there should be a folder there called disk managment double click on it. and it should look like the picture below Right click on your C: drive and click change drive letter and path. You can change it there to whatever you want. But they do warn you and this is true that it might break things because like shortcuts that are to C:\wherever won't work because the C: drive is now the D: drive so be carefull.
 
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That was the first thing I tried.

When I go to change c: to something else, it says that it contains a pagefile and stops. It also wont let you change a system partition.
 
TalRW said:
This is FALSE, you don't have to reformat. .


NOT FALSE!!!!

If D: is the drive of his windows installation, you can try all you want on any account you have, you CANNOT change the driveletter of it. There may be 3rd party programs that allow you to do this, but inside of windows itself, you cannot change the windows partition to a driver letter different than what it named itself with when you first intalled it.
 
you could make the pagefile on another drive, say d, and try, but from my knowledge u cant change it, but i have done it before where i did a ghost of old c and took out old c and maded sure that d was a bootable drive... it worked for me, then i added the other as slave and it found it as d.
 
so any free 3rd party apps?

I dont mind reformatting the new drive- its just a mirror image of the old one- so just doing the image from scratch with a partition magic like piece of software would be fine- I just dont want to pay for partition magic.
 
TollhouseFrank said:
NOT FALSE!!!!

If D: is the drive of his windows installation, you can try all you want on any account you have, you CANNOT change the driveletter of it. There may be 3rd party programs that allow you to do this, but inside of windows itself, you cannot change the windows partition to a driver letter different than what it named itself with when you first intalled it.

I admit defeat, you are correct and I bow to your wisdom
 
Ok, I looked at more stuff about the problem, and it seems like I should be able to disconnect the old drive and the new one would be recognized as 'C'- but its not booting correctly as I described above.

Why might this happen.
 
This article describes how to change the system or boot drive letter in Windows. For the most part, this is not recommended, especially if the drive letter is the same as when Windows was installed. The only time that you may want to do this is when the drive letters get changed without any user intervention. This may happen when you break a mirror volume or there is a drive configuration change. This should be a rare occurrence and you should change the drive letters back to match the initial installation.
How To Restore the System/Boot Drive Letter in Windows
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;223188
 
TalRW said:
I admit defeat, you are correct and I bow to your wisdom


You shouldnt, you're right.

Disable your page file on all hadrdrives for a little while.

Go to computer management and unmount and remount the hardrive. Mount it under a different letter. It let's you do it. Ive done it, at least in XP PRO.
 
I lost big time doing this. On Win2K there are hidden dependencies to C:. The missing file was ntboot or somesuch. Make good backups. It might be faster just to reinstall everything *after* putting the new drive on the primary channel.
 
I had the same problem and could not figure it out either. I got around it by using making an image of the original drive C: on a slave, installed windows on the new drive, then copied the backup image on to the new formated partitioned drive. Unfortunately I needed a place to store that original image and a backup imaging program, like Norton Ghost. NG is pretty cheap on Amazon.com
 
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