Ghosting and changing Boot Partition Letter Designation

[JCH]

I hope some one knowledgeable here can explain this or point me to a good
reference. I'm running XP-Pro and want to change my hardrive to a new
larger one. I have Norton Ghost which should be able to clone my existing
drive to the new one. OK fine.
My question though is how do I insure the new drive will be designated "C:"
and not some other letter?
I got advice earlier from someone that said to change the current drive to a
slave and install the new larger (and empty) drive as the Master. Then boot
Ghost via a start-up disk and go 'ghosting' from there. I did that but still
the new, larger, drive was designated somethign other than C: Thinking
about it makes sense. How could there be two C: drives regardless of if they
are Master or Slave. So, I'm back to my original question: How can I
switch my boot drive to a new HD and still maintain its C: designation?

I thought there was a utility in Partition Magic that would change the drive
designation but no... it doesn' t work for the boot partition. People must
upgrade their HDs all the time. How do you do this and keep all your files
and the C: designation?

One more thing. Is it good practice to keep the OS on a separate partition?
Maybe I should do this while I'm upgrading.

Thank you, and sorry for the length of this message.

 

[Greg P Rozelle]

Make a disk image or partion image from a norton boot disk with ghost
on it & cd drivers.

Use thease switches

GHOST -FDSP -NTIL -SPAN -CRCIGNORE -FRO -Z9

Don't change any other options.

Then put the hard drive in. Do any low level format needed than use
windows98 fdisk to make one or two partitions. (You can get a boot
disk from http://www.bootdisk.com/ ).

Note if making only one partition use disk image restore, if makeng
two partition use partition image restore. You might need these to
fix any boot problems

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q310994
Sometimes using fdisk /MBR
will fix the boot problems even if it NTFS. At least it work on my
machine.

You may need to reactive windows agian after doing this.
After activing back agian.


Greg P Rozelle
Disclamier My advice is as-is and could even trash you system.
http://www.angelfire.com/in4/computertips/

 

[I'm Dan]

I hope some one knowledgeable here can explain this or point me to a good
reference. I'm running XP-Pro and want to change my hardrive to a new
larger one. I have Norton Ghost which should be able to clone my existing
drive to the new one. OK fine.
My question though is how do I insure the new drive will be designated "C:"
and not some other letter?
I got advice earlier from someone that said to change the current drive to a
slave and install the new larger (and empty) drive as the Master. Then boot
Ghost via a start-up disk and go 'ghosting' from there. I did that but still
the new, larger, drive was designated somethign other than C: Thinking
about it makes sense. How could there be two C: drives regardless of if they
are Master or Slave. So, I'm back to my original question: How can I
switch my boot drive to a new HD and still maintain its C: designation?

It sounds like you booted your new copy while the old disk was still in the
system. If so, that's where you blew it. Ghost works fine if done
properly -- install both disks, boot from floppy, clone disk1 to disk2,
remove disk1, insert disk2 as master, reboot Windows.

The key to your problem is . . .well, a registry key. Unlike Win9x, the
NT-family OS's contain a registry key recording a unique signature for each
partition and associating it with a drive letter. (This is how XP
"remembers" drive letters.) Your original disk and clone disk have
different signatures. The old registry remembers drive letter C: belongs to
sig1, and has no record of sig2 yet. The registry is cloned to disk2 along
with the rest of the operating system. When you first boot the clone, the
registry discovers sig2 and gives it a drive letter. If disk2 is the only
disk in the system, it will assign C: to sig2. But if the old disk is still
in the system as a slave, XP will recognize the old sig1 and remember it was
C:, so sig2 will be given some other drive letter.

Try cloning again, but this time remove the old disk before the clone is
booted for the first time.

 

[Greg P Rozelle]

Note -FDSP switch will remember you old volume numbers.
This is what Norton told me.

However windows xp will possible still note it as a new drive.

Greg P Rozelle