Need some help reorganizing my partition arrangement in WinXP.

[Mears]

I've posted this at a few other forums with no success, so I'm going to just copy and paste:

Ok, last night my registry screwed itself up and I couldn't boot into WinXP. There is a knowledge base article on how to fix it, but it didn't work. I decided to try and use the repair option. After I ran the repair, I noticed that system files had been placed into one of my partitions on my second drive. I assumed that Windows was using that information so I decided to just reformat my windows partition on my first drive and then do a fresh install. The drive that my windows parition is on is split in two. Both are NTFS, but my Windows partition just has windows on it. After I finished installing, I looked in disk management and noticed that my Windows parition was set as a boot partition and that the other partition on that drive was set as a system partition. I don't think that is right. In the past, my windows parition was always designated as a system partition. Why is it not this time and this other partition is?


****EDIT******
Also, for some reason the drive letter of that system parition was set to F: I need it to be d:, but I can't change it because it is a system parition.

Anyone have the slightest clue as to why it is designating the non-windows partition as a system partition and how I can change it back to just a regular NTFS partition?


Ok, I figured out why it is doing it. On this hard drive I have three partitions. The first two are NTFS and the third is fat32. My first NTFS partition is for my OS. However, when I reinstalled this last time I deleted the partition first and then created a new one and then reformatted. Stupid idea I know. So upon recreating it, it treated it as the third partition. Is there any way I can reorganize the partition numbering so that my smaller NTFS parition is number 1 like it used to be instead of number 3? There is no option in the formatting portion of the WinXP setup that I could find.

 

[Mears]

Just a bump. I know the above post is a little long. The most important thing is the last paragraph though.

 

[Dubliner]

if you are just wanting to change the lettering scheme in windowsXP there is a snap in tool in the Administrative Tools -> Computer Management that allows you to reletter your drives.... under storage, then disk management. then just right click on the drive and choose change letter.

as far as changing it outside the OS, i dunno about that one.

 

[Mears]

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, it's not possible to change drive letters for system partitions. I'm going to reinstall again, but the problem lies in the fact that the setup program views my OS partition as being the third parition since I deleted it earlier and then recreated it. Since all the OS boot info has to be on C: it gets stuck on the partition that I created second originally, which got moved to the first partition after I deleted my original first partition (OS) and recreated it(which moved it to the third parition[last]).