NT Drive reassignments

[BottleWasher]

I have an NT server with 2 partitions - system (C and data (D. I was in the process of reinstalling NT on the system drive to clear up some problems I had been having with it. Instead of formatting the drive & reinstalling NT I deleted the partition first. This moved my Data (D partition to C:. This is where my question comes in:

Is there a way (utility, etc) that will allow me to move the data partition BACK to D: (or anything other than C) so that I can reinstall NT?

ANY help is greatly appreciated!

bw

 

[wolluf]

How did you delete the partition (obviously not from within NT)? Have you tried just installing NT to the first partition - you may find that it will become the C: drive. Presume there's no operating system on the drive now?
btw, is D: a primary partition?

You can use NT's Disk Administrator to change drive letter assignments (and unlike 2k/XP it will allow you to move the system drive letter too), so if it does end up as D: you could do that (but you'd probably need to edit registry to change D: entries to C: too).

Until there's an operating system, there effectively isn't a drive letter - so you can't change it till you've installed.

Of course, there's always the option of slaving drive in another machine, backing up Data partition, and doing a completely clean reinstall (remove all exisiting partitions and create new ones). Then restore Data partition from backup.

 

[BottleWasher]

I deleted the partition within the NT setup -- where it asks which partition I want to install NT on. Instead of just formatting the C: partition (which is what I had *intended* to do), I deleted it. Thus moving my D: partition to C:. I tried installing NT on the D: partition, but it (the partition) was bigger than NT will allow as a bootable system partition.

I ended up using a 7200rpm IDE drive as the system partition and my SCSI is now solely my data partition.

If there is a way to reassign the drive letters without a working NT system partition, I would still LOVE to know. But if not, I have worked around it.

Thanks wolluf - I appreciate your response as well as all of the responses I have received from all the members here in the past!

bottlewasher

 

[wolluf]

As I said - without an operating system there are no drive letters (then when you start installing one, it will assign letters to existing partitions & any you create during the install). Glad you've worked round it. One thing don't really understand - after deleting the first partition on the drive, why didn't you just create a new one in its place using the same NT partitioning tools you used to delete the original one? As I also mentioned, I'm not sure how NT install would label this partition - but I think if you quit the install after creating and formatting the partition, then start install again, you should get desired partition letters.

 

[BottleWasher]

I did create another partition immediately after deleting it. Unfortunately, NT assigned the partition as drive 'D'. Therefore, I had one large parition (now C and one small partition (D. With that being done, NT won't boot for a partition larger than 4gb nor will it boot from the D: partition.

 

[wolluf]

1. Did you try installing to the small (now D partition? There's absolutely no reason NT shouldn't install and boot from there (whether is C: or D: doesn't matter).

2. Did you try my suggestion of recreating the first partition - then abandoning the install & starting again?

3. One way of making NT install see first partition as C: might be to hide the second partition (eg, use this

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/steve-dunn/PD.zip

from a win98 boot floppy or similar) before starting the install.

4. You can install NT on partitions larger than 4GB - but if your install CD is pre-SP4, it will only see the first 8GB of any disk. You need this

http://www.htl-steyr.ac.at/~morg/drivers/NT_Atapi/.

I realise you're probably quite happy with how you got it to work, just thought these points might be of interest.