Changing drive letters?

[duragezic]

Assuming I have use of PartitionMagic 7.0, is there anyway I can do this without much headaches? I read in the PM help and on MS's site that you can't change the drive letters in win2k, but I seem to remember doing it long ago on another computer that I'm pretty sure was win2k.

I had a 27.3gb hard drive with a windows install on it (and all my files I needed to xfer) since I didn't wanna be w/o a comp through the weekend I was waiting for my 80gb to come in. So I got the drive in and installed it as Master and the 27.3gb as slave. I used the win2k boot disks and created two partitions on the 80gb in the win2k setup and installed win2k. But then when it's done and I boot into windows, my old hard drive has c: still, my cd-rom drives e: and f:, and the new 80gb hdd with g: and h: (my fault, I should've known the previous install would take c:, but I couldn't format the drive since I had a lot of stuff on it).

Ideally I'd like the new hdd to be c: and d:, the old one as e:, and the cd-roms to follow. Can I do this or is it just not worth it?

 

[johnjkr1]

Did you give disk management a try? It lets you alter drive letters.

 

[imported_Bunter]

Partition Magic will allow this, as will the Windows 2000 Disk Management program (through Administrative Tools / Computer Management).

Windows 2000 will not allow the boot partition to be anything other than C, so it sounds like you are booting from your old drive. If you haven't already, make the old drive the slave and the new the master.

Then, what you want to do is easy enough in Disk Management. One thing to remember is that the drive letter needs to be vacant to move something to it (there is no way to do a swap in one motion). So, if you want to move G to D, you have to reletter D to something farther down (like M), then reletter G to D, and proceed like that until you get what you want. It is all done through pull-downs.

 

[duragezic]

Well the new one is already master and the old one is slave. It is indeed booting from the new one, even though the drive letter to that partition is F:. I verified this by looking at the boot.ini that shows disk(0)partition(0) as the partition to boot from, and disk(0)partition(0) is F: according to win2k setup, BIOS, etc...

I didn't know of the Disk Management of win2k, but I will give that a try first when I get home. I had just posted this question cause I thought changing the drive letter would produce a lot of problems of entries pointing to c:\ (old hard drive) which has now been formatted, but don't programs use %root% (as opposed to c:\...) or whatever so it can take whatever letter is booted partition?