There are detailed descriptions of the function of boot.ini available on Msoft Knowledgebase, but to give you a basic indication of how drives are referred to by the BIOS, the first harddisk(Primary Master) is called Disk 0 (Zero) the first partition on the first disk is partition 1 That is your C drive. Your second disk is actually referred to as Disk 1 so in your case XP is located on Disk 1 partition 3. Your boot.ini file is configured to boot XP in that location. I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

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Thanks Richard, So that's what I will do...take out the 100gb do a Ghost copy then bin the old c drive. What do I call the new drive when I am copying from the old C drive? I guess I will have to make the new drive the slave while I copy to it? Then change it back to master?

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Here is how you can make this work. Delete g: Ghost f: to what was g: but leave the partition in place. Ghost c: to the present d: Remove the 10gig drive Configure the 100gig as master. You now have c:[98 and multiboot] d: e: and f:[xp] Does it make sense now why I had you delete g:? If you want to add the 10gig back [and I have no idea why you would] there are issues you need to be aware of. It can NOT have a primary partition on this 10gig or your drive letters all get bumped. This means the 10gig will be d: and xp will be on g: which means it won't load correctly due to registry entries [like your pagefile]. solution is to wipe the drive using fdisk from a boot diskette. This makes the drive raw. Now you can boot regularly using the 100gig drive. Go into disk management in XP and create only a EXTENDED partition and then make logical drives in theat extended partition. This way you won't mess up your drives letters enumerations. Golly gee wilerkers everyone. Learn to Internet Search

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Hey wanderer, the one step you forgot about was where the boot.ini file is pointing to for XP. Under the current setup it is on the second disk in the third partition. If you re-arrange the drives and do all that ghosting and re-configuring the boot.ini will still be looking for XP on a second disk that no longer exists. You could of course do a manual edit of the boot.ini file or boot up using the XP CD and use recoveryconsole to run FIXBOOT and FIXMBR which will reconfigure the boot.ini to find XP in the new location. I still believe your answer is the least efficient way to go since it involves ghosting both the 98 and XP drives to new locations with all the attendant risks. and involves removing the current G drive as well as formatting the current F once it is ghosted to where the old G was.. Don't you agree that doing a single ghosting operation of the original C drive to the new 20G drive is far less risky and certainly simpler than the process you have described? Not that youe method won't work but it is far more complex and carries far greater risk of trashing the whole system. I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

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Good catch on the boot.ini. You are correct though fixboot/mbr would not correct the boot.ini. Bootcfg is the utility to do that. Personally I would just do a manual edit of the boot.ini and change disk from 1 to 0. I think Richard59 you are missing a fundimental of drive lettering enumeration. The first primary partition of each disk is enumerated first before any other drive designations. This makes your statement; "That way you only have to ghost once and you maintain your current D,E,F & G drives including the XP operating system." incorrect. The actual drive letter assignments, being the only drive in the system, would be c,d,e,and f. Not only would 98 not load but XP would be on e: not f: [which is why I had PaulPaul delete g: and ghost f: to g: since I knew the drive letters would change. Remember now that 98 is dos based. So it uses msdos.sys to find where windows is. In PaulPaul's present setup that entry in msdos.sys is "c:\windows" not d:\windows. Even if you correct that you still have the same issue you do with XP; invalid registry entries. Except for the boot.ini my plan is perfect and will take less time than booting into recovery console or doing a repair reinstall of xp. I have done similiar [posted a year or so ago] when I combined two smaller drives with multiple partitions into a single large drive. I am using that system at home to this day. Golly gee wilerkers everyone. Learn to Internet Search

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