Hard Drive Partitioning

[Acidheadcracker]

OK, I have one Harddrive which is split into two partitions, c:\ for the OS and D:\ for apps.

Problem is that I built a new system and poped the old harddrive into the new machine. I booted with the win xp cd and wan't to format the c:\ os partition and reinstall windows. But when I deleted the c:\ partition I was left with free space and then it changed the d:\ partition to c:\.

So now I have windows xp installed on d:\winnt which is not the ideal suituation. I can't do a full wipe of the drive cas I have critical apps totaling about 80gb's on the origional app partition.

Question is.... Is there anyway to swap the drive letters and if I do, will this interfere with my machine booting up when it looks for the mbr?

Advice welcome...

 

[KeyserSoze]

As far as changing your drive letters, that would be Control Panel-->Administrative Tools-->Disk Management. From there, you can change your drive letters. But I'm not sure at all, about how it would boot up then. It will look for a MBR (Master Boot Record), so I think it should be ok, once it finds it on whichever drive it's on.

But I'm NOT SURE about this. So I guess wait till some smarter members come through here





KeyserSoze

 

[Wolf00]

First, let me make sure I understand the setup of your hd first. You've got two partitions that were previously labeled c and d. C was the first partition on the drive and D was the second partition on the drive. If this is incorrect, then what I'm about to say won't apply.

When you boot off the WinXP CD (this all assumes XP Pro as I've never used XP Home) and get to the hard drive partition section, you should be able to delete the partition that was previously your C drive (the first partition on the drive). At this point, no drive letters should change (at least I've never seen them change at this point). If you reboot, then setup will set your remaing partition as C. You can then re-create the first partition using the free space that is at the beginning of the drive (the new partition will be labeled D or E depending on where your CD-ROM is, but don't worry). You will then need to reboot to let setup see your new partition. It should then label the first partition as C and the second partition as D (just like you want, correct?). You can now continue with the setup and install windows on C.

As I said, I may have misunderstood how you have things setup so my answer may not apply, but I hope that I have helped. If this didn't help or if I misunderstood your setup, please let me know and I'll be more than happy to try again

 

[Postmortem6]

Don't mess with system partition on windows 2000 /XP. If you change its name or position compared to boot partition, system will be useless.

What is your problem?

Active partition is your windwos XP partition, but that partition is NOT on beginning of drive. If you create partiton on beginning of drive, it will have drive letter D:

I recommend you to reformat. There are other stuff to explain, but it will take too long to explain. Chances are small that you can fix this without reformating.