system partition

  • Thread starter Thread starter Madministrator
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M

Madministrator

I have one hard drive configured so: c drive is boot
partition, logical partition in extended drive ; d drive
is primary system partition. I installed W2K on the c
drive. How did this configuration occur? How do I fix it
so the c drive is primary, active, boot, system partition?
 
This happens if your hard disk contained two primary partitions before you
started installing Win2000, you deleted the first one and created a new
partition during setup. This MS Knowledge Base article has more
information:

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=227707

There are no tools within the operating system that can change a logical
drive to a primary partition - especially since it is your boot partition -
but perhaps some third party partitioning tools might have this option.

You would also need to copy the boot files (boot.ini, ntdetect.com, ntldr
and possibly ntbootdd.sys) to C:, and edit boot.ini to point to the correct
partition. Also, ensure that the partition is active before trying to boot
from it.

Best regards

Bjorn
 
Hi, Madministrator.

If you are willing to start over, it should be easy.

First, decide what you want to end up with. Assuming you want only a single
partition, just boot from the Win2K CD-ROM and follow the prompts, including
the very early one that asks if you want to repartition your HD. Tell it
yes. The default is to create a single primary partition using the whole
drive. (At least, that's the default in WinXP and it was in Win2K, too, as
I recall.)

Remember that MS uses terminology that is counter-intuitive in a couple of
ways. As many writers have commented, we BOOT from the SYSTEM partition and
keep the operating SYSTEM files in the BOOT volume. In MS-Speak, the system
partition must be a primary partition, and the currently active (bootable)
partition. The boot volume may be any primary partition or logical drive on
any HD; it can even share the system partition. The boot volume holds the
boot folder (named \Windows, by default). The "system files" total well
under 1 MB; the boot folder might hold over 1 GB of files in many
subdirectories. (I'm sure you know all that, but there are probably others
reading over our shoulders who might not.)

While the extended partition typically follows all the primary partitions,
that arrangement is not required. And the system partition need not be at
the front of the HD, or be assigned drive letter C:. Perhaps your HD was
pre-formatted before Win2K was installed, and Win2K Setup had to work with
the configuration that it found, rather than creating new partitions from
scratch and assigning drive letters.

RC
 
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