Drive letters - how to change?

  • Thread starter Thread starter brian
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brian

Hello there: I've received excellent help here before, hope you can assist
again.
I've purchased a new hard drive. I made an image (with BootitNG utility) of
my old xp pro. 4 gig. partition. I then formatted the new disk with one 6
gig. ntfs partition, and 4 other logical fat32 partitions (I want to dual
boot linux and need to share files). I installed the new disk as slave,
restored the image to the new 6 gig. partition, swapped the drives around
and booted from the new 6 gig. partition with no problem.
Here are the two situations that I would like help with:
First, the drive letters are not what I'd like them to be. Currently, the
primary ntfs partition on the master h/drive is E:. C: is still the
partition on the (now) slave drive. I'd like the partition I'm booting from
now to be C: but I don't know how to change it. All the other partitions,
well I can learn to live with those letters, but I'd like the primary,
active partition on the master to be C:
Second, the 4 gig. image restored onto the 6 gig. partition leaves 2 gigs.
'unallocated' according to Disk Manager. How can I get those to be used by
the operating system imaged onto that partition?
thanks for the help
brian
 
When you restore the image to the new 6 gig partition, you need to use
BootIt NG to resize it to the full 6 Gig available. If you made the image
at 4 gig, that's what it will restore to.

Put your drives back the way they were, old drive as master, new drive as
slave, and boot into XP. Once at the Desktop, click Start, Run and enter
REGEDIT Go to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

In the right pane, delete all but the Default value. Then shutdown Windows.
Use BootIt to copy the existing 4 gig partition to the new drive. Then use
BootIt to Resize it to the 6 gig you want. There is no reason to make an
image first. Then turn the computer off, swap the drives around, and
reboot. Note: If you're using BootIt's boot manager, you may need to edit
your Boot Menu to reflect the changed drives.

Also, make sure you have the latest version of BootIt, www.bootitng.com
 
Sorry, left out one step at the end. After all is said and done, right click
My Computer, Manage, Disk Management. There you can reassign drive letters
to all but the System and Boot drives
 
Thank you very much - when to the registry key, deleted all the entries
except the 'default' one, rebooted, and MAGIC.
Appreciate your help very much. Will resize the partition later.
brian
 
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