Alex Nichol said:
Disk Management looks fine, but the drive letter may be hidden. Use
TweakUI - one of the XP Powertoys from (if you have installed XP SP1)
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/powertoys.asp
If you have not installed SP1, the earlier version can be found at
http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/2/WXP/EN-US/TweakUiPowertoySetup.exe
Once installed you will find it in Start - All Programs - Powertoys for
Windows XP
Its My Computer - Drives page, make sure all the letters concerned are
checked
Thanks Alex. I'm happy to report that I appear to have resolved it.
For those that are interested in the detail, or who can help me better
understand this whole area, and for those novices who end up googling
to this post, here's a full account, picking up from my last post:
I couldn't get my mind around this. IOW, why DI wouldn't just place
the restore into E. Why would it place it in 'free space'? If it ends
up in 'free space', how can that carry the drive letter E, to get
things back into shape? My thinking was along the lines of: If I go
ahead and let it restore to this free space, would my partitions look
like they did before? And will that then still appear on the list of
options when I boot up, i.e as "Windows XP Home Edition #1"?
That delayed me a fair while. But I now know that the DI message was
at best ambiguous. IMO, it was downright misleading to a novice like
me. It should have just said it would delete the *contents* of the
partition. And ditto for the messages it displayed during the Copy
Drive approach.
Anyway, I finally bit the bullet and did the Restore Image. I had now
apparently re-copied my XP Home system partition C onto partition E
with Drive Image 2002, and E was now of course up to date rather than
nearly 2 years old. However...it no longer worked!
When I rebooted I got the familiar 3 options for a few seconds:
Windows XP Home Edition
Windows XP Home Edition #1
XP Recovery Console
But if I choose the second, instead of booting into my 'alternative'
XP as it used to do, I now get this error message:
"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or
corrupt:
<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll.
Please reinstall a copy of the above file"
Yet that file looked identical in both C and E (75.6 KB, 29th Aug
2002).
Anyway, after further research and head scratching, I vaguely
understood why the image restoring approach had failed. It was because
all the registry references after the restore would be wrong. So the
boot up wouldn't find any of the files, and hal.dll just happened to
be the first.
That confirmed that I *should have persisted* and used Copy Drive,
which is intended for this purpose. That's plainly what I used 2 years
ago. The bad sector crash incident had put me off, followed by the
misleading wording in DI about deleting the partition. (That's the
same in the Create Image and Copy Drive operations.
So I then repeated the copy drive, copying C to E. It eventually
rebooted, and I could see that the original 3 options were present,
plus one more, to 'Windows XP Home #2'. So, yes, I could now boot into
alternative versions of XP Home.
But my drive letters had now been scrambled! C had become E and E had
become C. And by default XP was booting into the 'copied' version. All
very confusing to me!
http://www.terrypin.dial.pipex.com/Misc/Mess1.gif
Deeply buried, I then found XP System Properties>Advanced>Startup &
Recovery>Settings>System Startup has a box for 'Default Operating
System'. So I could change that easily.
Trouble is, by that stage I could not get my brain around *which* one
to choose <g>.
From that drop-down box I selected this:
"Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition (#2)" /fastdetect /NoExecute
They now both looked identical once I was into XP. Of course, if I
kept swapping, I'm knew I'd get into a mess. But what I wanted is what
I had: to boot up to a 'system' partition called C, on my original
(oldest) hard disk. So this would also be the 'boot partition', I
think.
This is how it looked like, after changing the boot partition in XP
Properties:
http://www.terrypin.dial.pipex.com/Misc/Mess2.gif
If I left it like that, then I'd be working from system C. That's
good, because C is the familiar label. But I'd be accessing most of my
data and many programs on Disk 2, which makes me uncomfortable. I want
most of my activity to be confined to one hard disk, disk 1, and only
access disk 2 for backup of data nightly, plus hopefully rare
emergencies when I need to boot into the alternative (increasingly
old) XP system.
But if I arrange to boot from E, then the goods and bads get reversed?
So it seemed to me I 'just' wanted to relabel C as E, and E as C - but
without screwing up the registry and hundreds of shortcuts.
Then, after one more reboot, somehow XP automagically returned the
partition names to their correct original labels!
http://www.terrypin.dial.pipex.com/Misc/LookingGood.gif
It also removed that 'Boot' annotation. All I did was what I'd done a
couple of times before, namely change the default boot drop down box I
described.
