Luvsmel said:
I have a desktop system with two different sized HDs with both having the
identical xp media edition installed.
The problem is that windows is not allowing me to manage the pecking order.
Drive "0" is being read in disk mgmt as drive D and Drive "1" is being read
as drive C.
In the bios upon boot up, Drive 0 is in fact being read as the primary
master and Drive 1 read as the primary slave.
I have tried to change the letters of these drives to drive 0 = C and drive
1 = D but a window pops up saying that I can't change the name of the boot
drive.
"Windows cannot modify the letter of your boot volume or system volume"
I've tried diskpart - select drive- select volume/partition to deactivate
each drive
but it hasn't helped.
I keep getting the same message.
How is it that windows has determined both drives are the boot drive
instead of just one??..and is there any way to force the letters to change?
TIA
NT based versions of Windows don't care about the physical detection order
of mass storage devices as determined by the BIOS. It uses the signature
that it wrote in the MBR to identify a partition to a drive letter. To see
the structure of the MBR, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record
That way, no matter how you reconfigure the drive for its physical detection
order, Windows still knows that drive with that signature is assigned the
same drive designator. This eliminated the problem of relying on the BIOS
using its physical detection order to assign drive letters since moving,
removing, or repartitioning the disks would result in drive letter changes.
Anything that alters the disk signature could corrupt the drive designators
since Windows no longer has a correct lookup (for example,
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/293778). If that happens, you can use
Rescan Disks in the Disk Management applet to store new disk signatures so
that drive designators remain the same no matter where the disk gets moved.
I suspect you could still run into problems if you start adding or deleting
partitions on that disk. The disk signature identifies the disk even after
it is moved. It doesn't identify a partition on that disk.
If you want to change the drive letter of a partition, you can't change it
to a drive letter that is already in use. If you want D: to become C: and
C: to become D: and assuming G: isn't used, change C: to G:, D: to C:, and
G: to D:.
C: -> G:
D: -> C: (because C: became available from the 1st change)
G: -> D: (because D: became available from the 2nd change)
You sure that you even want the OS partition to be identified as drive D:?
Many applications remain hardcoded to use some space on drive C: (even
Office applications do that). Since you can't have more than one instance
of Windows running at a time on your host, why wouldn't you want its
partition to be identified as C:? No matter what partition you use to boot
Windows, you can have it identified as the C: drive. That may not be true
with Microsoft's stupid dual-boot scheme but no one outside of Microsoft
uses that kludge (where you boot one OS to then load a different OS).
Get a real multi-boot manager. Put each OS in its own primary partition
(you can have up to 4 partitions on a hard disk where 1 to 4 of them are
primary partitions). The primary partitions not used for booting will be
hidden (unless you undo the hiding by going into Disk Management to assign a
drive letter to them). The *active* primary partition (which is what the
multi-boot manager changes based on your selection) will be the C: drive.
There will be no conflict with the OS'es in the other primary partitions
because they aren't assigned a drive letter under the instance of the OS
that you do boot. GAG (available at Sourceforge) is a good free multi-boot
manager. You can even set it up to run from a floppy until you decide the
setup is correct and then copy it to the 446-byte bootstrap area in the MBR.
Normally in a multi-boot setup, C: is the Windows (system) partition. The
other primary partitions for the other instances of Windows remain hidden by
not assigning them a drive letter. Drive designators are defined within the
instance of Windows that is running. So when you choose a different
partition to be the active one and use its boot sector to load its instance
of Windows, drive C: defined in that instance of Windows will not conflict
with what is drive C: in the other instances of Windows, and similarly for
any other drive designators you define within an instance of Windows. So,
for example, if you didn't want to hide the other instances of Windows, in
instance #1 you could have its OS partition as C: and another partition as
D: (which has another instance but inactive copy of Windows). Then when you
choose to boot to the other instance of Windows, its partition is defined in
that instance of Windows so it is C: while your first instance but inactive
copy of Windows is D:. That would let you do file management in the
partition holding the inactive instances of Windows. It also means they are
more likely to get infected when your active instance of Windows gets
infected.
__________ Information from ESET Smart Security, version of virus signature database 4913 (20100303) __________
The message was checked by ESET Smart Security.
http://www.eset.com
Please configure your anti-virus solution to stop spamming the newsgroup.
It makes you look stupid. No one is going to believe a post is clean simply
because the poster or their AV program says so. It's just text. It's spam.
