My boot volume becace the "D" drive instead of "C"

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ethan Lipman
  • Start date Start date
E

Ethan Lipman

So I just had some wacky trouble with my system, and I decided it was
time to blow it away and start fresh..

My drive was partitioned as follows...

c: was my "system drive" the first 20 GB
d: "my data drive" was the remaining 60 GB

After booting from my XP CD, reformatting the 20 GB partition, and
re-installing XP, I now have my C: and D: lables switched, and
apparently irreparble so since the disk management tool wouldn't allow
me to change either of them.

What on EARTH does it mean that my "60GB" data partition is the
"system" according to the disk management tool?

Shouldn't my "boot" partition and my "system" partition, be the same
freaking partition?! I don't really want to get used to typing D: to
get to my C: drive on this desktop.

1) What the heck happened
2) Is there any clean way to fix it without blowing it away AGAIN. (My
data on the 60GB partition cannot be trashed, so hopefully the answer
isn't repartition the entire drive!)
3) If I DO have to blow it away again to get the lables right, how do I
make sure it gets the lable right this time?

Thanks in advance!
 
actually the OS was installed on the correct partition, but after
booting FROM that partition, it's lable came up as D: instead of C:
From reading other posts on usenet, I believe this happened because I
Click to expand...
reformated my system partition, thus making my 60GB data partition
"primary" which then stole the "C drive" letter away from my smaller 20
GB system partition.

I still need to undo this as I want my partition with the OS to have
the "C:" label

Anybody got any ideas?
Here's a screen capture of what I'm dealing with
http://bootsystemswap.notlong.com
 
actually the OS was installed on the correct partition, but after
booting FROM that partition, it's lable came up as D: instead of C:

reformated my system partition, thus making my 60GB data partition
"primary" which then stole the "C drive" letter away from my smaller 20
GB system partition.
Click to expand...

Close, but not quite.
==========
First a couple of Windows XP truisms:
1. Windows "preferred" way of disk partitioning is one primary
partition plus one extended partition containing one or more logical
drives.
2. Windows XP Setup will assign drive letters to primary partitions
first.
==========
Here is how it probably happened
1. You had two primary partitions on the disk.
2. You deleted the first partition (C:) during Windows Setup.
3. You rebooted the computer.
4. Windows Setup assigned letter C: to the second partition.
5. You created the first partition, which became a logical drive in
the extended partition. Letter D: is assigned to this new partition.
7. You installed Windows XP in the first partition.

Another way it could have happened:
1. You had two primary partitions on the disk.
2. You used some other program to delete the first partition.
3. You booted from Windows XP CD.
4 - 7.. same as above.

What you should have done:
1. You had two primary partitions on the disk.
2. Boot from Windows XP CD.
3. Select new installation.
4. Pick the first partition (C:) to install into.
5. Choose to format the first partition, which remains as C:. and
primary.

Alternatively, you could have done the following:
1. You had two primary partitions on the disk.
2. Boot from Windows XP CD.
3. Select new installation.
4. Delete the first partition.
5. Immediately recreate the first partition, which remains as C:, but
is now a logical drive in the extended partition.
6. Pick the first partition (C:) to install into.
When installation is completed, the second partition D: is the active
primary partition (System).
I still need to undo this as I want my partition with the OS to have
the "C:" label

Anybody got any ideas?
Click to expand...

Recreate the first partition as primary, and make it active. One way
to do this is to connect the drive as slave in another Windows
computer, and use Disk Management.
 
So here is exactly what I did

I booted from my XP CD.
Deleted my first 20 GB partition that held my previous installation.
Then chose to partition and install into that soon to be NTFS formatted
partition.
I didn't restart the computer anywhere in that process, but it doesn't
appear to have needed that.

Apparently I should not have deleted that partition first, and I would
have been presented the option of re-formatting that partition if I had
just chose to install right then and there?

One thing I DID notice was that there was an 8 MB chunk of
"unpartitioned" space. Is that being reserved on purpose for
something? Or is that just the way the math works out with my 20 / 60
split? Not that I'm concerned about 8 MB, just idle curiosity.

So I dropped my drive into another computer as a slave, and I was all
ready to regconfigure that drive and make the first 20GB the "active"
partition, but even after a reformat of that first 20GB chunk, I didn't
see any option to change which was "active".

Turns out this second computer's HD has enough free space that I can
dump the 25 GB I was using from my 60GB partition, onto the 2nd drive,
and now I can then setup my HD with the proper primary and secondary
partition config that you mentioned.

I was about to just copy the files over from within windows, but then I
was also thinking, this might be a good time to learn a thing or two
about "ghost". I could ghost my 25 GB of stuff over to that 2nd drive
right? But then I saw that ghost needed to do something to my drive
before it could back it up, some disk identification, and I got mildly
concerned that it might not be able to restore my data properly if I'm
mucking with the partion that it will be restoring to.

That is to say, I'm backing up 25 GB of data from a 60 GB primary
partition.
Would it have been a perfectly good idea to restore that 25GB of data
to a newly created 60 GB *extended* partition?

What's the word on the street about the tagging and virtual partioning
that Ghost does to the HDs for it to play with them? Would ghost have
been a better way to deal with the 25 GB backup I just did by slowly
dragging files over to the 2nd HD? Perhaps once I've got my system
setup again, it would be worth making a Ghost image to cover my arse
against future WinXP calamity.
 
So here is exactly what I did

I booted from my XP CD.
Deleted my first 20 GB partition that held my previous installation.
Then chose to partition and install into that soon to be NTFS formatted
partition.
I didn't restart the computer anywhere in that process, but it doesn't
appear to have needed that.

Apparently I should not have deleted that partition first, and I would
have been presented the option of re-formatting that partition if I had
just chose to install right then and there?
Yes.


One thing I DID notice was that there was an 8 MB chunk of
"unpartitioned" space. Is that being reserved on purpose for
something? Or is that just the way the math works out with my 20 / 60
split? Not that I'm concerned about 8 MB, just idle curiosity.

So I dropped my drive into another computer as a slave, and I was all
ready to regconfigure that drive and make the first 20GB the "active"
partition, but even after a reformat of that first 20GB chunk, I didn't
see any option to change which was "active".
Click to expand...

You cannot merely reformat. You have to first delete the logical drive
and extended partition. Then recreate it as a primary partition, and
set as active.
Turns out this second computer's HD has enough free space that I can
dump the 25 GB I was using from my 60GB partition, onto the 2nd drive,
and now I can then setup my HD with the proper primary and secondary
partition config that you mentioned.

I was about to just copy the files over from within windows, but then I
was also thinking, this might be a good time to learn a thing or two
about "ghost". I could ghost my 25 GB of stuff over to that 2nd drive
right? But then I saw that ghost needed to do something to my drive
before it could back it up, some disk identification, and I got mildly
concerned that it might not be able to restore my data properly if I'm
mucking with the partion that it will be restoring to.

That is to say, I'm backing up 25 GB of data from a 60 GB primary
partition.
Would it have been a perfectly good idea to restore that 25GB of data
to a newly created 60 GB *extended* partition?

What's the word on the street about the tagging and virtual partioning
that Ghost does to the HDs for it to play with them? Would ghost have
been a better way to deal with the 25 GB backup I just did by slowly
dragging files over to the 2nd HD? Perhaps once I've got my system
setup again, it would be worth making a Ghost image to cover my arse
against future WinXP calamity.
Click to expand...

There's no reason to ghost ordinary data.
 
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