Assignment of harddrives

[Charles Stuart]

I have just added another harddrive to my system (Dell
Dimension 1.3ghz WinXP). I have cloned my C drive (almost
full) to the new one (E). How do I make E - C and vice
versa?

 

[Pavel]

All you have to do is to make the new drive the boot drive. Depending on
your bios, this can be done in Bios settings. If the Bios settings does not
have provision to boot from any drive then you may have to set this new
drive as Master and make the old drive as slave. Check your motherboard
manual.

 

[Charles]

I have tried that. However the new drive has been "named"
E and I can't change that to C as it says C is in use. If
I try to boot from E as the primary the bios does not
recognise it as it only recognises c as the system hard
drive.

 

[Pavel]

The new drive is named E when looking from the original C, right? You can
not have two C drives so the OS assigned drive letter to it. You probably
have another drive or partition named D. Since you say you cloned the
original to new drive then the new drive has all references pointing to it's
self and it thinks it is C. You can not assign the new drive letter to it
from within Windows and this is probably what you tried to do. Simply having
this new drive seen by the bios as boot drive will be sufficient to make it
be seen as C and once Windows loads from this drive it will then see your
old drive as different drive letter.
Best way to test this is by unplugging the old drive from the cable. If then
you see some error message that you can not boot on this drive, you may have
to run the Installation Windows CD repair portion in order to make the
Master Boot record work correctly and this takes only couple of seconds.
Depending on the cloning program you used, this should have been done
automatically by it.