Accidently installed WinXP onto D drive

[MrBlahh]

White trying to finish this computer in a hurry and being careless I accidently installed WinXP onto the D Partition. Is there any way I can get everything onto the C drive without having to reinstall everything? Im guessing the best thing to do is to just reinstall windows on to the C drive but I thought Id ask here to see if there is a quciker way around this.

I dont have a problem with reinstalling windows...its the updates I hate sitting through

Thanks

 

[blackstealth007]

can you xcopy it over?

 

[wiredspider]

I sorta did the same thing on my machine, I was hoping to just rename, but doesn't seem to be an option

 

[fuzzynavel]

Rename the drives?

 

[Bozo]

If you have Partion Magic or something similar:

Delete the 'C' partition.
Expand the 'D' partition to fill the old 'C' partition. You can also just move the partition.
Make sure the new partition in set to Primary and bootable.
Use 'fdisk' or any other program to rebuild the MBR. [fdisk/mbr]

Bozo

 

[egkenny]

You are right. Windows XP lets you change just about any drive letter but the one for the Windows boot partition.

There are literally hundreds of registry entries that have "D:" in the path. In theory you could change these but if you mess up you could make your computer unbootable. I actually did this one one time with Windows 95 but it was a pain.

You are better off reinstalling.

 

[JackMDS]

You can not ?play? with the boot drive letter since (as mentioned above) there are hundreds of references in the registry and other system files to the OS been in Drive D:.

You have to reinstall the OS.

It is important to be careful these days. If you have devices (like external USB drives) that can be bootable and rewritable it might be considered by the hardware as the first Bootable device and would force Windows to install on the hard drive as a second bootable device (hence D: or higher).

So before New installation, disconnect any External Drive and disable similar bootable hardware. After the core Installation plug/switch On the other drives and Windows will add every thing else with letters above C:

:sun:

 

[WebDude]

On my last XP install the boot drive ended up being G: Wasn't too happy at first, but I haven't really had any problems just leaving it that way. Not sure now why or whether it's at all important to have the boot drive on C: