Here is the deal. I currently have 4 hard drives in my computer (10.1G, 18.1G, 27.4G, and 45.0G drives). I originally was running Win 98 SE on C. I also have D,E,F,G and H drives due to number of drives and to the way large clusters eat up hard drive space. I eventually installed Win XP on some free space on the 27G drive and it was installed as I.
Two things have happened: One, I have decided I no longer need the Win98 partition and the space it is using, and two, I have recently purchases WD 1200JB drive. I want to make it one large partition (NTFS, not FAT!) and put sub folders in it to hold the data (Games, Applications, etc). I have used Ghost to copy over the Win XP partition to the new drive and it is now fully bootable (installed where the 27G drive used to be). Once I get all the data copied over from the old drives to their new home (yes, I KNOW I am going to have to do a lot of registry editing to get everything working again), I want to remove the other three drives from my system for other use.
At this point, the boot drive is going to seen as C: and Win XP will not boot because it can't find the right drive. I THINK all I need to do is go through the registry and point everything from I: to C: (so all the bits and pieces of the OS are looking in the right locations) and then edit boot.ini from "default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(3)partition(2)\XP" to "default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(0)\XP" to tell it where to look. Will this work? Does anyone have a quick and easy way to do this?
If that won't work, I guess I can "upgrade" my XP installation by reinstalling XP (without deleting the XP folder first). It shouldn't cause too much problems, but I would have reinstall a lot of things and play with the installation to get everything working again. Other ideas?
Thanks for the help.
Two things have happened: One, I have decided I no longer need the Win98 partition and the space it is using, and two, I have recently purchases WD 1200JB drive. I want to make it one large partition (NTFS, not FAT!) and put sub folders in it to hold the data (Games, Applications, etc). I have used Ghost to copy over the Win XP partition to the new drive and it is now fully bootable (installed where the 27G drive used to be). Once I get all the data copied over from the old drives to their new home (yes, I KNOW I am going to have to do a lot of registry editing to get everything working again), I want to remove the other three drives from my system for other use.
At this point, the boot drive is going to seen as C: and Win XP will not boot because it can't find the right drive. I THINK all I need to do is go through the registry and point everything from I: to C: (so all the bits and pieces of the OS are looking in the right locations) and then edit boot.ini from "default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(3)partition(2)\XP" to "default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(0)\XP" to tell it where to look. Will this work? Does anyone have a quick and easy way to do this?
If that won't work, I guess I can "upgrade" my XP installation by reinstalling XP (without deleting the XP folder first). It shouldn't cause too much problems, but I would have reinstall a lot of things and play with the installation to get everything working again. Other ideas?
Thanks for the help.
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