transfer of OS to another drive and mbr

[AdamC]

I mirrored my C: drive, which contained my XP system to a
new drive and everything is working fine with the new
drive acting as the system drive. However, it appears
that there are still elements of applications and Windows
that make calls on C:\. Ideally I would like to delete
the entire WINDOWS folder that's on that drive. Can I
safely do this?

Question 2 - Question 1 might be irrelevant if someone
can tell me the following: The total of the contents of
drive c:, by adding up the individual folders, is about
1.9G; according to the system, the contents totals about
3Gig. I have previously removed the pagefile from this
drive. What the heck is taking up the extra Gig and how
can I clear this space?

Question 3 - Can I move the mbr to the same drive that
contains the system, or must the mbr be on c:\? It's
fine if it does, just asking!

Adam

 

[Hans-Georg Michna]

I mirrored my C: drive, which contained my XP system to a
new drive and everything is working fine with the new
drive acting as the system drive. However, it appears
that there are still elements of applications and Windows
that make calls on C:\. Ideally I would like to delete
the entire WINDOWS folder that's on that drive. Can I
safely do this?

Adam,

no. If any crucial component is called from C:, your system will
not work when you remove C:. The safer way is to remove the
entire disk and make the new one C:. An alternative is to search
and replace all references to C: with references to the new
drive letter, but this is ultimately impossible, because you
cannot rule out that a program stores such references anywhere
in its files, even encoded. It's still doable---I have done it.
But it's not for the faint-hearted.

Question 2 - Question 1 might be irrelevant if someone
can tell me the following: The total of the contents of
drive c:, by adding up the individual folders, is about
1.9G; according to the system, the contents totals about
3Gig. I have previously removed the pagefile from this
drive. What the heck is taking up the extra Gig and how
can I clear this space?

No idea. Could be NTFS structures, perhaps for many small files.

Question 3 - Can I move the mbr to the same drive that
contains the system, or must the mbr be on c:\? It's
fine if it does, just asking!

The truth is that the MBR has to be on the drive that's
physically connected to the primary IDE port as master, because
that's where the BIOS fetches it.

Hans-Georg