help converting dual boot

[senecadan]

have a dual boot system with win98 on c: drive and win2k on d: drive (separate hdd's). I need to make the win2k drive become the c: drive. What is the best way to go about this without having to re-install all the programs?

Thanks,
Senecadan

[BipolarBill]

You can't do this, really. You can delete the Windows folder on C and shrink the partition down with Partition Magic, but you can't change the drive letter of either drive. The C drive is what MS calls the System drive and D is the Boot drive. That's what MS calles them. :rolleyes: At any rate, they cannot be changed to my knowledge unless you're willing to copy all of the files on D to C and change the BOOT.INI path to add a new choice

Add this:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional 2" /fastdetect

below the similar line there. After you've copied the files to C, reboot and select that as the system to boot. If it works, format D and edit out the other path in the BOOT.INI.

[senecadan]

Thanks but the problem is that the physical drive c: will be going away due to problems with it. So I need to change the d: drive into the c: drive.

Senecadan

[BipolarBill]

Edit your line as above and copy NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, BOOTSEC.DOS and BOOT.INI to the D drive. Try a restart. If no joy, boot from the Win2K CD and choose Repair using the Recovery Console. At the prompt, enter FIXMBR and then FIXBOOT. That should do it.

[senecadan]

Thanks, I'll try that tomorrow when I can work on it. I'll let you know how it goes. Hopefully I won't hose everything. :)

Senecadan

[senecadan]

OK got it going finally...whew! After copying over the files and making the changes to boot.ini, I had to run the repair off the win2k cd. As expected I had to change all the references to the d: drive in the registry to c: (thanks go to the makers of Registry Replacer at http://www.whatican.com) ZoneAlarm and Mozilla had to be re-installed but no problem there. What caused the most problem was MS Office2000, kept getting an "error 1324: the folder path 'Program Files' contains an invalid character". After checking MS Knowledgebase, I ran the msicuu.exe program which let Office re-install.

Thanks for your help BipolarBill!

Senecadan