C drive renamed to D drive - a bit stuck

Hi all,

I'm currently rebuilding a laptop - I've got backups of everything so I'm not stressing yet, but I'm a bit stuck on the best way to proceed. I Ghosted the C partition (XP and apps only) onto the D partition, and then used the XP setup utility (by booting with the XP CD) to delete the C partition so I could recreate it a bit smaller, reformat it and load the Ghost back on using Ghost's recovery disk.

All went according to plan, except that the setup utility now calls the existing D partition "C" making my new, smaller, intended-for-system partition "D". Trouble with this is that XP won't boot from "D", and even if I could get it to do that I'm not sure whether I'd be able to change the drive letters in Disk Management?

I'd like to avoid wiping the whole disk and starting again, and I'm convinced there must be a simpler way to straighten this out.

Should I load a copy of XP onto the "new" C drive (which is actually the larger D drive) - and if so, how do I go about swapping them around later so that XP is in the smaller partition?!

 

If I were you I'd load XP onto the C drive then use a program such as BootIt NG (http://www.majorgeeks.com/BootIt_Next_Generation_d646.html) to resize the partitions.

 

Thanks Yargwel - but wouldn't doing it that way that mean I'd lose all the personal stuff already on that partition? I was hoping to save myself more hours of transferring data, installing another copy of XP, and buying new software to screw around with partitions.

As it was, I actually decided it might be easiest to just dump all my personal stuff onto an external drive (with Ghost's recovery CD file browser) and use XP setup to partition and format the disk again. Then I ghosted back the C drive onto the new, smaller C partition and I'm currently reloading all my personal stuff back onto the larger D partition.

It's been a real drag though, and I'm sure there must be a way to just re-label the partitions so that Windows could boot from the 'real' C drive as normal.

 

I think maybe you shouldn't have deleted the C partition and made it smaller. You should have run the XP setup, told it where to install the OS. It would have told you that there was already an OS on that partition and allowed you the option to do a clean or a repair install. When you select clean, it will format and install XP fresh.

 

Plodr is right, When you deleted the partition that was drive c, you deleted the primary boot partition. When that happened your remaining partition was automatically set as the primary boot partition. To get them set back proper you'd need a third party program like partition magic to edit the partition table.......

 

Thanks for the additional replies folks - we live and learn eh?

Plodr, would that approach have given me the option to shrink (or split) the C drive, without affecting the D drive? From memory it would only allow installation on, or deletion of, the C partition, so I'm not sure I could have achieved a smaller C drive by doing it that way.

I've resisted Partition Magic this far, not for any specific reason other than the times I need to do this kind of thing are so few and far between. I'd also rather start with clean, hard partitions rather than 'soft' (ie, software created) partitions, so I didn't really mind reformatting the entire drive - it just seemed like such a drastic solution to fix an incorrect drive letter!

Cheers,
WG

 

If you start doing shrinking and/or splitting the partition before D, I think it will have a drastic effect. You know either have extra space or a partition between C and D and I think the computer might want that space/partition to be designated D. I'm not 100% positive. I do know in linux you don't fool with partitions in the beginning or middle of the hd unless you want everything screwed up.
You don't need to purchase Partition Magic if you want to do this. I had it on a computer along with Boot Magic and finally got rid of both.
There are free open source tools like gparted and qtparted that allow you to work with your partitions. Some linux live distros include partitioning tools so you can work with the hard drive. I'm trying to use qtparted (I'm still at the newbie stage). I used the partitioning tool included with PCLinux (an earlier version) to do my partitioning but now I want to learn something else.
http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/screenshots.en.html
http://gparted-livecd.tuxfamily.org/screenshots.php