Lost of partitions question.

Ok this is gonna be confusing.
and Ill try to make it as short as possible.

I have three Physical Hard drives.(Is this the correct term for this. Three drives I can actualy hold in my hands?)

My C: and F:
(W Digital 320gig NTFS)
One hard drive two partitions.
My operating system windowsXP Pro is installed to the Extended partition . of my F: drive.
(How I managed to do this I will never know..??)

My E:
(W Digital 250gig NTFS)
One hard drive one partition.
Two days ago I moved everything off E: drive and converted it to NTFS instead of the Fat32 that is was.

My D:and G:
(W Digital 200gig NTFS)
One hard drive two partitions.
Until today.Now one hard drive and one partition.
And as of about two hours ago these are no longer Overlapped. A Long time ago I had somehow managed to overlap them. So both were showing errors in any partition manager.(Interesting enough Windows Never did show that.)

But anyway I moved everything thing off of them and I partitioned/formatted this one with only one NTFS partition now.


So what I am wanting to do is put WindowsXp NTFS on my W Digital 250 gig which is now my E drive. want to make that my C drive boot drive.( I guess it would be called my boot drive?)

then I will move all the files off of the C and F drive as I want to get the operating system off of that extended partition ..
and eventually wipe it clean and start fresh with it as well.
Would like that (the W Digital 320gig NTFS)to be in Two partitions.
Don't Have to be but would like it to be in two.
as I have read somewhere about having one partition for ram only? but that will come after I tackle this part first. One mountain at a time

I really don't care what drive letter anything has except I want my C: drive to be the default.
as " "Everyone else seems to make it their default.

And it looks like to me that I don't have anything set to active right now. From what I can tell anyway..

I am going to upload a couple of pictures to help show what I am seeing.

One is picture of my Computer managment and one is what partiton manager program shows.

http://i31.tinypic.com/2qn1con.jpg

and

http://i29.tinypic.com/28uofnr.jpg


the good thing here is I am all NTFS and finally wont be overlapped anymore.

I will wait to have some instructions before I dare to turn this thing off. as I am not sure what is what drive at this moment.

Looks like I need to set something to active and put all the drive letters in place as well? is this right?
And if this was/is a lucky guess can anyone tell me how to do this?
If not a lucky guess maybe someone could tell what I DO need to do.

And don't know if I need to post this or not but I do have 2 dvd/cd burners and a floppy drive as well.

Hope this all made since..
to someone besides myself who I can confuse most of the time.!


Thanks for any help in advance.

 

Moving your XP to a primary partition on any drive is easy with Partition Manager. Just clone it there and set the partition active and write an MBR on the drive. Then copy the boot files from the current C: partition and edit the boot.ini - job done. You may have to set the boot order in the bios. The one thing that is difficult to do is change XP’s drive letter. If you want to change it from F: to C: then the easiest solution is to reinstall XP. (I did somewhere recently see an app that claims to be able to do it, but I can’t now remember where I saw it).

If you want to go ahead anyway with the cloning I’ll give more detailed instructions. By the way your C: partition is the current active partition. In PM8 click View>Choose Columns… and tick the box for "˜Active/Inactive’ and this will put a new column into the display.

 

Dont think I want to clone??

great I changed the view that helped.

I think while I was retyping my post you were replying.
I don't think i want to clone anything.. think it would be best to start fresh?

thanks for your reply.

 

Any cloning you do will make it necessary to rename the target drive to F: when booted (on the fly via mtd volumes) so that all shortcuts and registry references will be correct.

There are softwares that will do that and even reinitialize the boot sector and MBR, such as XXCLONE, but you'll still be stuck with having XP on the F: drive as opposed to the C: drive.

I would recommend backing up any valued personal files and reinstalling XP to the C: drive. It's the only reliable method of getting XP onto the C: drive and have it work properly.

 

FWIW, the way you have Windows installed now shouldn't create any problems. You don't really have it installed on an extended partition. It's installed on a logical partition within the extended partition. With XP, it's not like the old days. It doesn't care what kind of partition it's on. I've been running the computer I'm using now for 4 years with it installed pretty much the way yours is now without any problems.