Renaming drive letters and creating problems.

[3putt in coastal SC]

I installed a second SATA drive, and imaged my partioned C/D drive to the
new drive. My new drive became drives J/K. Switching drive cables on the
board made no difference. Relettering them caused problems. After I
thought I had moved my DVD drive letter and memory card reader letters
further down the chain, I relettered the C/D drive letters, made my J/K
drive (new hard drive) the C/D drive. I also set it as bootable drive. As
the system booted a blue screen came up "Preparing your desktop"....... I
waited many hours as the hard drive, which one I don't know, chugged along,
most times not doing anything. Frustrated, I did a backup/restore (alt f10)
resetting the drives to their original letters. What I wanted to accomplish
was to rename the new, larger drives as C/D and move the smaller drive to
the E/F positions. This seems logical to me, making my boot drive C:, and
the backup drive the E: drive. But something, Vista or the mainboard,
didn't agree on that solution. So now I have my J: drive bootable system
drive, and the C/D drives as my backup/imaged drives.

The procedure, which seems the same, worked very well in XP.

 

[PaulB]

Have a look at this article. What you should have done is after cloning the
vista drive,
diconnect the old drive before booting to the new drive. You also may have
to rename the drives in the registry (see article) if configuring desk top
comes up. Then reconnect the old drive.
http://www.multibooters.co.uk/cloning.html

 

[3putt in coastal SC]

Thanks for the link. That was a lot to digest. The Seagate Disk Utility
made it look so simple. But I guess it assumed that when adding a new and
larger disk, that the user would be happy to see the new disk assigned J/K
drive letters. It does say that you can "simply" use Disk Management to
reassign the letters. Which is what I tried to do.