How do assign drive to boot/system partition?

[Ed]

I had an XP Home system that had 2 partiotions when I bought it. There was
4GB on one and the rest of 120GB drive was on other. 4GB had the boot stuff.
In XP, the big partition was assigned to drive C and the boot partition (4
GB) was drive D.

I needed to install W2K and make it dual boot. So, I use Norton ghost to
save the drive C. I partitioned and install w2k and XP and everyting seems
ok except:

Now, the boot partition is drive C, my 2 CD drives are drive D and E. W2K is
drive F and XP is drive G. I like to copy the hgost image to XP partition
but I assumed all the registry points to C. How can I move drive letters
around to make XP in drive C? While in XP, I tried to assign H to C but it
does not let me reassign the boot or system partition.

Thanks

 

[Ron Sommer]

You don't mention the size of the partitions.
I don't quite understand your problem.
Save the boot files from C:.
Restore the ghosted partition to C:. hopefully, you made the new C: ( the
first partition) large enough to hold the ghosted partition.
Put the boot files back on C:.
Change the boot.ini file to show XP as being on the first partition.
Delete the XP on G:.

 

[Alex Nichol]

Now, the boot partition is drive C, my 2 CD drives are drive D and E. W2K is
drive F and XP is drive G. I like to copy the host image to XP partition
but I assumed all the registry points to C. How can I move drive letters
around to make XP in drive C? While in XP, I tried to assign H to C but it
does not let me reassign the boot or system partition.

You can't change the drive letter of the partition in which the system
is installed (where the windows folder is) or in which the original boot
happens. There are just too many registry references. The lettering
as seen by either system is up to *it* and may mean that the same letter
(eg C) gets used for what are in fact physically different partitions:
not, I think, very likely with what you have done, but be aware of the
possibility. You can change other letters - eg of the CD drives in Disk
Management to put them on down the alphabet and have them the same in
either system.

If as I understand it, you have done a new clean install, you may be
able to restore into that and have the restored registry have letter C:.
If on boot it does not pick up that letter, run regedit.exe and open to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\Mounted devices. There look for
DosDevices\x:
where x is the letter it has taken: double click and very carefully
change the x to C. (If C is already in use you will have to change that
to y - an unused letter) close and reboot.

But I do not use Ghost for this sort of thing, so I don't know if it
will foul this up by trying to be clever