Transfer system from IDE drive to SATA raid array

  • Thread starter Thread starter Pierre
  • Start date Start date
P

Pierre

I am trying to transfer my system drive from an IDE disk
to a SATA raid array. I copied everything from IDE to
sata, made it bootable, and succeeded booting from it, but
it keeps being mapped as drive E, and my old IDE as C.
When I remove my old IDE drive, I cant boot anymore : boot
sequence stops with the windows XP logo displayed in the
center of a blue screen
How can I arrange my SATA raid to be mapped as C: ? I
tried the Disk Management tool, and the command line
diskpart, but drive letter assignement for system drive
cannot be modified ...
Please help.

Pierre
 
The reason why your system will not boot when you remove
the old drive is that your new drive is still being
assigned to drive letter E:, but it is looking for a
pagefile on C:, which is no longer present.

Make sure you have adequate backups before following this
suggestion (assuming you haven't yet deleted the original
data from your old IDE drive this should be good enough
to restore from in case something goes wrong).

What you should do is to boot from the SATA drive once
again with both drives connected. Don't alter the
pagefile settings (ie. leave them set to use a pagefile
on C:). Now go into the registry (Start > Run > type
regedit and press enter). Navigate the tree
to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices". Look at
the entries on the right of the window. At the bottom
there should be a variety of entries starting
with "\DosDevices\". Here is where the system remembers
what drive letter a partition has previously been
assigned. Delete the entries corresponding to C: and E:.
Then close the registry editor and reboot your system.
This should automatically reassign your OS partition to
C: for you.

Alex Moore
 
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