New SATA Boot Drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Shiney
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Shiney

I have installed a new SATA drive in a system where the
old boot drive was IDE. The new drive is installed and
works fine as a boot drive, but it has a new letter and
Windows will not let me change it to the "C" drive. This
creates problems with some software that was copied from
the "C" drive (because it thinks its still there). The
SATA drive is on a totally different channel from the IDE
so there is no way to "slave" it to the old boot drive to
get Windows to change the letter (I think that's how I
did it in the past) and I can't load Windows without the
old "C" drive, even when booting from the new drive.

Should I change the new drive to "C" and if so, how? I
found a registry hack to do so but it warns not to do it
unless the boot drive letter changed by accident.
 
No way to change system drive letter.

How did you setup Windows on the new drive? Was it cloned or imaged with Norton's Ghost?

If you simply copy files from old C Drive to new Drive, then the registry will not reflect the correct settings.

If you use Ghost and do a Drive to Drive copy booting up from the Norton Ghost Floppy disk, then it should clone the old drive to thte new.

That way you should be able to unplug the old Drive and windows will boot. Given that you have already installed the drivers etc for the SATA drive.

This method should then have the SATA as the C Drive.

Make sure BIOS is set to boot off the SATA drive and not IDE drives.
 
Thanks BAR - I cloned the old drive using MAXBLAST 3
(although the new drive is not Maxtor). Do you think I
should try Ghost instead of Maxblast?

-----Original Message-----
No way to change system drive letter.

How did you setup Windows on the new drive? Was it
Click to expand...
cloned or imaged with Norton's Ghost?
If you simply copy files from old C Drive to new Drive,
Click to expand...
then the registry will not reflect the correct settings.
If you use Ghost and do a Drive to Drive copy booting up
Click to expand...
from the Norton Ghost Floppy disk, then it should clone
the old drive to thte new.
That way you should be able to unplug the old Drive and
Click to expand...
windows will boot. Given that you have already installed
the drivers etc for the SATA drive.
 
Unlike win9x, XP does not automatically assume that the boot drive to be
C:\. (That can be a good thing in some cases, but not for you.) Worse, it
seems to remember some of the details about hardware, like brand, size,
interface. So, even if you remove the old drive it will continue to reserve
the letter C:\ for it.

There are two things that might to fix the problem:

1. Remove the old IDE hard drive, format the new drive, do a clean install
of XP on the new drive.

2. Remove the old hard drive, do a "repair" install of XP. Note that a
repair will re-detect hardware, load new drivers if required, but leave your
personal files and programs alone. However, it will also erase all windows
updates later than the contents of the XP CD. Also, repairing may not be
supported if you have an OEM version of XP, like Dell, Gateway, etc.
 
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