Alien said:
I installed win98 on C: while Win2000 on D:, but now I want to remove
win98 and move win2k to C:.
I just cloned D and then restored it to C.
After the new system started, lots of paths still point to D:,
especially the system variable
ProgramFiles=C:\Program Files.
On the other hand, lots of startup services' paths point to D:.
So I dare not format partition D. How to deal with this? Is there
another simpler way?
There is bad news for you and good news.
The bad news is that Win2000 must always run off drive D:
if it was installed on drive D:. Trying to run it off drive C: will
cause all sorts of problems.
The good news is that you can keep it running off drive D:
even though will the first partition on your primary disk,
by swapping drive letters. Here is how you do it:
1. Boot into Win2000.
2. Make sure the hidden files c:\ntdetect.com and c:\ntldr exist.
3. Use notepad.exe to edit the hidden file c:\boot.ini.
4. Change the two occurrences of "partition(2)" to "partition(1)".
5. Run diskmgmt.msc via Start / Run.
6. Make sure your first partition is set to active.
7. Run regedit.exe.
8. Navigate to HKLM\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
9. Rename \DosDevices\D: to DosDevices\Q:
10. Rename \DosDevices\C: to DosDevices\D:
11. Reboot your PC.
12. Rename Q:\WinNT to WinNT.old, and
Q:\Program Files to Q:\Program Files.old.
13. Move the hidden files Q:\ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini
into some holding folder.
14. Run diskmgmt.msc and change the drive letter for
drive Q: to drive E: (for example).
Now wait a few days. If all is well then you can format the
second partition of your hard disk.
These problems are easily avoided by using a proper
boot manager, e.g. XOSL. It's free!
