XP C Drive and D Drive Reversed

[CyberWorld]

Hi Again Guys,

I have a lady friend that i was helping via phone support.
She formated her win 98 PC and installed XP Pro. I did not know or did she, that she has (2) hard drives. she formated and installed XP on drive D. The PC works ok, the thing is a lot of programs she install's are looking for C drive. I told her to replace C with D for now when it ask and we got around that problem.

The question is can I rename the drive letters in XP. I dont think i can talk her through removing and swaping drive cables and jumper settings.

and C never got formated but that i can help her witrh when
we get this problem resolved.

Also, can i transfer all the data from D to C, i think C is a larger drive ? and wil it boot ?


Thanks In Advance guys.
Steve

 

[jdemmi]

I don't think you can change the drive letter of the drive which holds the boot partition. But I wonder what would happen if she were to physically remove the 2nd hard drive.

Even if you could change the drive letters you would not be able to simply copy the data from one to the other and still have it boot into XP.

Since she really never formatted C, I wonder if she now has a dual boot PC. 98 and XP.

Are you sure that she has 2 physical drives and not 1 paritioned drive?

-- Jason
"It's Just Ones and Zeros

 

[CyberWorld]

She did delete both partitions. This i know but when she did the format she picked the wrong drive. to be honest I thougt she has 2 partitions and told her to delete both.
I never though of 2 hard drive. I wont make that mistake again..
I can format the c drive, it does ask if i want to format C with i click on it. I did not want to format it just yet, for fear the pc will try to boot to a formated drive with NO OS on it.

I connected to her pc via microsoft remote service,

 

[jdemmi]

You can determine which drive XP is booting from by:

1. Locating which drive contains NTDETECT.COM, MSDOSY.SYS, IO.SYS and BOOT.INI

2. Going into Admin Tools and trying to change thd drive letters. It won't let you change the drive letter of the boot/system partition.





-- Jason
"It's Just Ones and Zeros

 

[bcastner]

right-click My Computer, Properties, Advanced, Startup and Recovery - Settings, and click Edit in the top box to examine the boot.ini file. What you are looking for is what is called the ARC path statement:

#1 ******** typical ARC path if booting from first hard drive
[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

#2 ******** typical ARC path if booting from 2nd hard drive
[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

If it looks like #2, it is unambiguous that the second hard drive contains XP.

In addition, since Disk Manager is prompting to format Disk C, the boot files must be on the second hard drive.

Format Drive C:
Leave all else alone, including XP on the second hard drive. If a second Program Files directory is created on Drive C it should not really matter to the end user.

 

[CyberWorld]

Thank you guys for all the help.

I understand if it works leave it alone. The problem is
drive C is larger then D. Also when she loads programs most default to C. course if i format C then it should not matter and they should work. I was considering making an Image of D and then restore to C. That should mirror D and also as a boot.

then take your info and adjust the boot.ini file.
I just hope i can do this via remote connection. then when I force a reboot it works cause i will be disconnected.

Thanks again for all your help
Steve

 

[bcastner]

I do not think an image is going to work, as the registry likely contains hundreds of references to drive D:

The sanest course is to reinstall.

Remember that you can move quite a few of the shell folders to drive C. (No, Program Files is not recommended). But the user profile and other folders make some sense to move, as they likely are the most sizable folders to consider.

In addition, if using the NTFS filestore you could use junction points creatively:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=205524

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/misc.shtml#junction

Otherwise, reinstall.

 

[jdemmi]

If you're really brave....You can use Registry Crawler to change all references from D:\ to C:\ or vice versa.

-- Jason
"It's Just Ones and Zeros

 

[CyberWorld]

First, let me thank all the people for your help.

I am going to sit back, read all the choices again.
I would love to reload it, but i am 2000 miles away and she is on dial up. I got her to the point of formating and installing base XP so i could connect via remote The first time. Thats when i noticed she was on drive D. but to format and Install XP & Update XP via a dial up account will take her untill Christmas lol.

Myabe i will just let it be for now. All is working
like bcastner said.

Thanks guys.