changing the System partition on an existing XP installation

[fredw]

Currently my system has 2 EIDE HDs, Drive 0(jumpered as Master) is C:
(System partition) and E: , and Drive 1(jumpered as Slave) is D: (Boot
partition). I used to dual boot into either Win98SE or WinXP. I have sinced
remove Win98SE. And now want to remove Drive 0 to free up an IDE channel.

Can I change the System partition to D:? I know I would have to move Ntdlr,
Boot.ini, and Ntdetect.com, etc. Are there any other considerations? Again,
I want to physically remove the Drive 0 (jumpered as Master) and replace it
with what was Drive 1 (jumpered as Slave).

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Currently my system has 2 EIDE HDs, Drive 0(jumpered as Master) is C:
(System partition) and E: , and Drive 1(jumpered as Slave) is D: (Boot
partition). I used to dual boot into either Win98SE or WinXP. I have sinced
remove Win98SE. And now want to remove Drive 0 to free up an IDE channel.

Can I change the System partition to D:? I know I would have to move Ntdlr,
Boot.ini, and Ntdetect.com, etc. Are there any other considerations? Again,
I want to physically remove the Drive 0 (jumpered as Master) and replace it
with what was Drive 1 (jumpered as Slave).

You did not say where WinXP is installed. This is essential.

 

[fredw]

WinXp is installed on D:

You did not say where WinXP is installed. This is essential.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

WinXp is installed on D:

1. As you said, copy the hidden files c:\boot.ini, c:\ntdetec.com
and c:\ntldr to d:\.
2. Modify boot.ini so that it uses partition(1) instead of partition(2).

When you remove your first disk, Windows will most likely re-assign
yjr drive letters. Drive D: will become drive C:. This is bad news,
but it is fixable. However, it would be nice if you could prevent it from
happening in the first place. Perhaps the following will do it:

3. Use the Storage Manager to change the drive letter of C: to F:.
If it won't let you do it, use regedit.exe: Navigate to
HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices and rename \DosDevices\C:
to DosDevices\F:
4. Reboot the machine. Can you log on?
5. Disconnect the first hard disk.
6. Boot into the Command Console and run fixboot and fixmbr.
7. Boot the machine with a Win98 boot disk (www.bootdisk.com).
8. Use fdisk.exe to set the first partition on your disk to "active".

There is a good chance that you won't be able to reboot after Step 3.
If so then the problem is easily fixed if your PC is accessible via a
network, a little less easily if you can install its disk in some other
Win2000/XP PC and quite difficult if it is a laptop. If you don't like
taking risks then I suggest you replace your first disk with a cheap
540 MByte disk instead of removing it altogether. Simply make it
active, copy the 3 WinXP boot files to it and run fixboot and fixmbr
under the Recovery Console.