NTFS boot drive letter assignment

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Guest

I used Partition Magic to copy my XP Pro boot partition to another disk
because my original boot disk C: was sounding dodgy.

The disk failed a few days later, but I was unable to boot from the disk
with the copied partition because I had forgotten that on an NTFS partition I
can't use the Win98 FDISK /MBR trick to fool XP's drive letter association.

I messed for ages trying to find how to do it with with recovery console,
but in the end was totally frustrated. Now MAP tells me that the drive I want
to boot from is D: and my other data drive (formerly D:) is now C:. So XP
can't finish booting because it's looking for stuff on the wrong partition.
For reasons I won't go into now, I must be able to boot from C: and my data
drive must be D:, but I can't find any way to swap back the drive letters.

It's this sort of thing that makes me hate NTFS....
 
Adam said:
I used Partition Magic to copy my XP Pro boot partition to another disk
because my original boot disk C: was sounding dodgy.

The disk failed a few days later, but I was unable to boot from the disk
with the copied partition because I had forgotten that on an NTFS partition I
can't use the Win98 FDISK /MBR trick to fool XP's drive letter association.
Click to expand...

You can use Win98's FDISK /MBR because it writes into
a part of the the very first sector of the disk only.
It doesn't matter if your partitions are NTFS formatted.

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm


Greetings from Germany

Uwe
 
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