Hi Folks

I've just bought a new hard drive for my main pc, the hard drive that was it's only one i've put as a slave on the primary ide and put the new one as master on primary.
The problem is after i installed xp which works fine and dandy the c: drive is the slave one and f: is the primary one with d: and e: being dvd rw and cd rw.
How can i change this round i've looked for the assign drive letters but must be going blind coz i can't find it, also i'm assuming this happened because i didn't format the slave drive (it had 40 gig of stuff ;) ) hence has a mbr or do all hard drives have an mbr regardless.

Cheers for any input :)

Si

XP can be a bit of a quere beast when it comes to this sort of thing.

I'm not too clear on the solution to your problem but what I'd do in your position is use Norton Ghost to copy a complete image from your old drive to your new drive, then format the old one.

XP will be booting off the big'un then, and the smaller drive can then be used for junking stuff on

I did roughly that last night, copied 40 gig over from c: to f: (my windows drive) then formated c: on a quick format in windows to no avail :(

Cheers for input though :)

Copied or Ghosted?

Copying only copies the files.

Ghosting makes a complete image copy of your drive, the new drive will end up a complete spitting image of the old.

People can correct me if I'm wrong, cos i may well be, but i think the NTFS partition leaves 8mb on the end of the drive, I believe the computer uses this as a bootstrap. Which then configures the drives and the bootable portion of the computer. This partition wont be visible in Windows, and so formatting the drive should leave it in tact, which I why i think you still have your prob.

How to Change a Drive Letter
To change an existing drive letter on a drive, partition, or volume:
Log on as Administrator or as a member of the Administrators group.
Click Start, click Control Panel, and then click Performance and Maintenance.
Click Administrative Tools, double-click Computer Management, and then in the left pane, click Disk Management.
Right-click the drive, partition, logical drive, or volume for which you want to assign a drive letter, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.
Click Change.
Click Assign the following drive letter (if it is not already selected), click the drive letter that you want to use, and then click OK.
Click Yes when you are prompted to confirm the drive letter change.
The drive letter of the drive, partition, or volume that you specified is changed, and the new drive letter is displayed in the appropriate drive, partition, or volume in the Disk Management tool.

cheers for that zhastaph it was just a copy ;)


Thanks fig :D

You'll have to juggle with the drive letters - reassign the CD drive to higher drive letters temporarily while you set the second HD to D:, then swap the CD back to the vacant letter.

Have you got Ghost? If you drop us an email I'll show you where you can get it from ;)

zhastaph i've got ghost ;)

Figgy :) apparently you can't reassign a windows boot disk managed to change the others though :D

That suggests the PC is booting from the old drive.

Yeah, that's wot I reckon. It does something wierd with that remaining 8mb of HDD at the end.

It's Bill I tell, he's upto something wiv it

On the disk management page, which drive is showing as "System" ?

f: drive which is the new one and the one that has windows installed is showing as system drive g: which was c: is showing as active drive

This may seem like an odd point, but if you remove the 'old' drive, does the computer still boot?

If it does, then great. Run FDISK and delete the partition off of the disk (old), this will kill the MBR too, which the quick format probably wont.

(If it don't, don't do this)