Logical Drive letters

[Edward Diener]

I want to copy ( and eventually move ) my Win2K system partition to another
larger drive. I have utilities which will allow me to do this and to boot off of
the other drive ( Paragon Partition Manager and System Commander ). I can also
go into my new Win2K system partition's boot.ini after the copy from my current
system in order to change the rdisk to the correct drive before booting into my
new system.

My question concerns logical drives I have on a different drive from my Win2k
system partition, which will not be moved. Will my new Win2k still find my
logical drives ? How does Win2k find logical drives ? If it is a relative disk
scheme to my system partition, then it does not seem that it will find the other
logical drives. If it is an absolute scheme, then it appears I am OK. Does
anybody know how it works ?

 

[Steve Duff [MVP]]

The short answer is that you are OK. The one caveat is that after imaging you MUST boot the
new partition by itself, most especially do not connect another system volume or the old one
for the first boot. This allows Windows to assign the signature correctly. When it says "Windows
has finished installing new devices...reboot?" Say yes. Do not attempt to use the system
for anything significant until you've rebooted - even though it appears to work fine - or again
you could run into configuration troubles down the line.

The longer answer is from Microsoft, here:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=234048

It is interesting and useful information, and worth reading through.

Steve Duf, MCSE, MVP
Ergodic Systems, Inc.

 

[Edward Diener]

The short answer is that you are OK. The one caveat is that after imaging you MUST boot the
new partition by itself, most especially do not connect another system volume or the old one
for the first boot.

I am not sure what this means. I attempted to just move the partition to another
drive but received an NTLDR not found when I tried to get my Boot Manager to
boot that new partition, so I did an entire disk copy using 3rd party software
and told my controller to boot off of the new drive but then received a registry
stop during the final boot sequence. See below and the newer post "Unable to
boot Win2k after disk copy".

This allows Windows to assign the signature correctly. When it says "Windows
has finished installing new devices...reboot?" Say yes. Do not attempt to use the system
for anything significant until you've rebooted - even though it appears to work fine - or again
you could run into configuration troubles down the line.

The longer answer is from Microsoft, here:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=234048

Thanks for the link.

It is interesting and useful information, and worth reading through.

Please see my later post called "Unable to boot Win2k after disk copy". I
decided to copy the entire drive where the Win2k system partition resides, told
my controller to boot off of that drive, and received a startup error. It is
possible my drive copy software did not work successfully, but I think it must
be something else. If you are willing to look at that post and suggest anything
I may have done wrong, it would be appreciated.