Drive Letters

I was personally reminded how annoying windows could be.

Here's the scenario: dual booting two XP's on my desktop.

OS 1 on C drive disk0 - data partition E.

OS 2 on D drive disk1 - data partiton G.

Switched out the HD for the C drive (disk 0) for a larger one.

Cloned the drive to the new one (in a usb enclosure) - scaled the partitions to the new size. I did this from OS 2 on D.

Made the switch - didn't boot - fixed the jumpering - booted ok and every thing works.

Next booted into the OS on D. The first thing I notice is that there is no C drive in My Computer - its now called L, and of course, can't change it because its a boot partition/drive.

Plus all the usb drive letters were totaly ******* up.

Got the lettering right again for everything other than what was C now L.

I know where the L came from - that letter belonged to the new HD that I cloned to. I did the cloning from the OS on D and did go thru the safely remove hardware procedure.

I think I can change the drive letter with PM. This is no biggee, but jeez.....

Regards - Charels

 

Yep that did it. You need to remove the ID code written to the first sector of hdd (MBR). Have read that if you use 98 boot floppy and run FDISK /MBR that will zero out the ID code , 98's MBR boot code is just as good as XP'S.
Can use a hdd editor program , I think its the 8 bytes starting at offset 1A05 to 1A0C. There are some XP third party programs that will also do it.
After that is done you will need to boot XP on C: not the one on D:.

 

Hi Charles (or is it Charels ),
All the major HDD manufacturers have a cloning program in their utilities. I would remove the #2 HDD, clone the #1 HDD to the new one, then swap the #1 and the new HDD. (Take the #2 HDD out so there is no chance of the wrong drive getting overwritten.)

Matt

 

Hi TopFarmer,

Thanks for the info on why this happened.


Hi Matt,

This was more of a vent than anything else

Everything works fine - no bad consequences. I just have a partition/drive L in place of letter C (disk 0) when looking at it from the 2nd OS (disk 1). Here, the 1st OS's boot partition is more or less a data partition.

When in the 1st OS (disk 0), then its own drive letter is C.

Hope I explained this right

In the picture you can see what I mean - this is taken when booted into the 2nd OS. The 2nd OS's boot partition/drive is D.

If I would be booted into the 1st OS, then what is L would be C and everything else would be the same.

I'm pretty sure I can change it using PM8, but even if I can't, there are no adverse consequences.

Regards - Charles

 

Booted into the 1st OS on C drive 0 and here's what Disk Management looks like:

 

Hi Charles,

I had the same problem a little while back. Caused by installing an OS with a USB device plugged in. Annoying isn't it!

Roger

 

Hi Roger,

You bet.

I hope Vista handles USB/drive letters better than XP does. Haven't used it long enough or hard enough to really test these issues.

Regards - Charles