Two (intertwined?) OS partitions

In a rush, I had a local shop put together a new PC for me while I made a quick trip out of town.

Long story short, they had to reinstall the OS (xp home), and the result was that they left the original C drive partition in place and created the reinstall in a new D partition. My intent was to eliminate the C partition by temporarily renaming it to X, then renaming D to C, and first attempted to do so with Partition Magic, but encountered a message that I would subsequently be unable to boot. The local techs said to use "Disk Management" to accomplish the switch, but I basically got the same message, so they then said to just go ahead and delete the C partition.

That concerns me. Both C and D appear as "local" drives, with D tagged as the boot drive, but C is tagged as the "system" drive. Partition Magic on the other hand tags C as the "primary" partition with a status of "activeâ€, and D as only a "logical" partition with a status of "Noneâ€â€¦

Lastly, FYI, on booting up, I encounter a message asking which of two XP Home OS’s to inititate.

Any suggestions on how to safely resolve this?

 

Your problem is based on normal XP behavior. Regardless of what drive/partition is runs from, it looks for several essential startup files on C: and if it doesn't find them, it won't start.

Simple enough to take care of though. Assuming that your good XP load is on D:, just boot from the XP CD and get to the recovery console. Once there (ugly black screen with white characters where you have to type stuff)

fixboot d: will put copies of the required startup files on D: and you can safely change any of the other drive letters that you want.

 

I am by no means recommending this since it is fraught with danger. But if you want to experiment and don't care if you lose your system access and have to format and reinstall, this is how to change the drive letter of the system partition:

DriveWrong: is the drive letter you want to change.
DriveNew: is the drive letter you want it to become.

1) Use regedit to give Administrators full control in Security > Permissions
of:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

2)Rename HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices\DosDevices\DriveNew to an
unused letter like DosDevices\Z:

3) Right-click \DosDevices\DriveWrong: and rename it to
\DosDevices\DriveNew:

4) Select the \DosDevices\Z: value name and rename it to
\DosDevices\DriveWrong:

5) Change the permissions back to Read.

6) Check and change the drive letters of the paging files by navigating to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSetxxx\Control\Session Manager\Memory
Management

7) Use Powerquest's Drive Mapper to ensure short cuts, registry entries, and
ini files take into account drive letter changes.

8) Reboot (or try, anyway ).