Changing My Designated System Partition

[Andrew Johnston]

I recently installed XP on a new HD I added to my machine, and now I'd
like to reformat the drive with my old installation and use it
exclusively for music files. However, the old drive is still designated
as the system partition. I edited the Boot.ini so the new install is the
one that gets loaded by default and I've run fixboot and fixmbr from the
recovery console, etc., but the old drive continues to be seen as the
system partition. In XP, the new drive is seen as C:\, but in the
recovery console, the old drive is C:\ and the new one is D:\.

Both drives are jumpered for "cable select" rather than as master and
slave. Could that be part of the problem? The old drive is seen as HD 0
by XP's disc manager. The BIOS for my computer has HD 1 (the new drive)
designated as the boot drive, which seems correct. I'd prefer to avoid
cracking open my computer and mucking about with the jumpers if at all
possible. Is there any other way to remove the "System Partition"
designation from my old drive? Thanks in advance for any help y'all can
provide.

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

Start/run diskmgmt.msc, right click the new drive and make it the active
one. Be prepared to redo the boot files (fixboot) from the Recovery Console
when you reboot.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Andrew Johnston]

Hi,

Start/run diskmgmt.msc, right click the new drive and make it the active
one. Be prepared to redo the boot files (fixboot) from the Recovery Console
when you reboot.

I did that, then got a message telling me boot.ini couldn't be found
(since it was on the old drive and not on the new one). After the
reboot, the new drive was listed as the system partition but the old one
was listed as "active" and I was no longer given the option to make the
new one active inside Computer Management. I used Diskpart from a
command line to activate the XP partition on the new drive and rebooted
off the CD, did a fixboot inside the recovery console and rebooted into
XP--this time, the old drive was once again the system partition and the
option to make the new one active was not available.

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

If the new one does not allow you to set it as the active partition, then it
already is. If you check the old one, you may find that there is now an
option to make it the active one.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Andrew Johnston]

Hi,

If the new one does not allow you to set it as the active partition, then it
already is. If you check the old one, you may find that there is now an
option to make it the active one.

The option to make the partition active is greyed out on the old drive,
which is once again the system partition. The new drive has two
partitions, and the only one which offers the option of making it active
is the one that doesn't have XP on it. This is really driving me
bananas. I manually created a boot.ini on the new drive and made sure it
had NTDETECT.com and NTLDR on it, then deleted those files off the old
drive. When I did so, the machine refused to boot and, in the recovery
console, told me I had no Boot.ini whatsoever when I ran bootcfg
commands. I think that's the key to the problem--for whatever reason,
the machine refuses to look for those files anywhere other than the old
drive, no matter how many times I do a fixboot or a fixmbr. This is
really driving me bananas...

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi Andrew,

Here is what I would do: Remove the old drive from the system. Move the new
one into the master position, set the BIOS to boot it, then boot with the XP
CD and run a repair installation on the new one.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org