Move boot sector?

[Ken K]

I have just finished partitioning and installing a replacement hard
drive on my Dell laptop. I must have made some bizarre choices, as c:
drive is marked System and f: drive is marked as the boot drive.

I had partioned the drive into three, planning on the boot and system
drive as C:, with two additional partitions as D; and E: drive The
CD-Rom is now the D: drive, but had the F: drive not been the boot
drive, I could have assigned different drive letters.

1. Can I change the boot drive to the C: drive? If so, how?

2. If not, where can I find files that will allow me to reformat and
repartition the drive from scratch? The Dell Windows XP disk did so
with a the new, unformatted disk, but now that the disk has been
formatted, I don't see files that will do the low-level formatting.

Thanks
Ken K

 

[dglock]

get partition magic version 8.
don

 

[I'm Dan]

I have just finished partitioning and installing a replacement
hard drive on my Dell laptop. I must have made some bizarre
choices, as c: drive is marked System and f: drive is marked
as the boot drive.

I had partioned the drive into three, planning on the boot and
system drive as C:, with two additional partitions as D; and
E: drive The CD-Rom is now the D: drive, but had the F:
drive not been the boot drive, I could have assigned different
drive letters.

1. Can I change the boot drive to the C: drive? If so, how?

2. If not, where can I find files that will allow me to reformat
and repartition the drive from scratch? The Dell Windows
XP disk did so with a the new, unformatted disk, but now that
the disk has been formatted, I don't see files that will do the
low-level formatting.

Once Windows sees itself as another drive letter, it's difficult to change.
It's going to be much simpler to just start over. (And spending money for
Partition Magic is clearly overkill for such a simple task.)

The Dell XP CD should do it if you pretend you're doing a new install and
then instruct Setup to delete each existing partition. Alternatively, you
can use a Win98 boot floppy (which you can download from www.bootdisk.com,
if you don't have one), use fdisk to quickly and easily delete all
partitions, and then you'll have a clean slate to start over with the Dell
XP CD.

 

[Alex Nichol]

I had partioned the drive into three, planning on the boot and system
drive as C:, with two additional partitions as D; and E: drive The
CD-Rom is now the D: drive, but had the F: drive not been the boot
drive, I could have assigned different drive letters.

1. Can I change the boot drive to the C: drive? If so, how?

No - that letter F: is now inbuilt in the registry to an extent that
makes change impracticable other than through a clean start.

2. If not, where can I find files that will allow me to reformat and
repartition the drive from scratch? The Dell Windows XP disk did so
with a the new, unformatted disk, but now that the disk has been
formatted, I don't see files that will do the low-level formatting.

If you have a bootable floppy drive to boot a Win908 Startup floppy, or
download an image of one to burn as a bootable CD (eg from
www.bootdisk.com), you could boot that and use its FDISK to delete all
current partitions (non-DOS if NTFS); then start over with the Dell
disk.

The underlying cause of the lettering may have been having some
demountable storage device connected at the time of setup - a Zip drive
certainly can cause this