I bought a 60 gig HD and installed it in an external enclosure. I partitioned it into four 15 gig each(G,H,I and J)partitions and cloned My C drive to the "I" partition. Now my question is how do I rename the "I" to "C" when i install the new HD in my computer. thanks joe
Windows 2000 and Windows XP * Open the Disk Management console (diskmgmt.msc).
* Right-click on any drive, and select Change drive letter and path.
* Windows will let you know if the drive letter cannot be changed for some reason.Sul-Reps Rulez
You can rename drives as described above, except the boot and/or system drive. Bear in mind that partitions don't have names, just numbers. Drive letters are allocated by the operating system at boot time. The drive the computer boots from and the drive containing the operating system cannot be renamed and is usually allocated letter C: With Windows XP there are exceptions. Generally speaking the boot drive and system drive are the same but they can be different.
Stuart
Let's say you used Ghost to do the cloning. Clone C: to I: but create an image on I: rather than just cloning it directly to I:.
(Partition to Image)Install the new drive and then using the image on I: clone it to C:. (Image to Partition)
Of course all of the above is done using the Ghost boot floppy.
Then it will be C: when you boot into Windows.
Bryan
why do that? especailly when "i" IS the new drive. Doing a partition to partition ghost it doesn't matter what the drive letter is on the external drive. It's only the partition number that matters.
Since ljoe put the clone on the right partition all he has to do is swap the external drive in place of the internal drive and the first partition will come up as c: and everything will be fine.
Golly gee wilerkers everyone. Learn to Internet Search
Some other considerations: XP system files can be installed on a logical partition but it must boot from a primary partition. So if your I: drive is a logical partition, it won't work..
To boot from a primary partition it must be made active in the MBR, which is not copied when you clone to a partition.
Use FDISK or GDISK to make that particular primary partition active.
Possibly fixmbr from the recovery console will set the partition active instead of using the old tools mentioned above.Best
You should be able to boot into the Recovery Console with the new drive installed and use the fixmbr command. There is a fixboot command as well that you might have to run if the fixmbr itself does not work.
"which is not copied when you clone to a partition." If you clone c: as partition to partition [which is what ljoe did] the MBR WILL be copied.
Does anyone DO this stuff to actually know?
Golly gee wilerkers everyone! Learn to Internet Search
Well if he cloned the C: drive off and dumped it to the I: drive. If he tries to boot off the I: drive after removing the C: drive then he might have a problem, because he has several partitions on the new drive. If he does not have any problems then he will not have to mess with any of this stuff.
The MBR will NOT be copied. The MBR will ONLY be copied if the ENTIRE drive is cloned, NOT a partition! When one clones a partition, only the partition is cloned! How could it be any other way? The MBR is NOT part of a partition, it is the first sector of the HDD, which is NOT part of ANY partition.
However, the "boot" sector/s are copied when a primary bootable partition is cloned. Thus all that is necessary to again make the partition bootable is to set the "active" bit in the in the partition table in the MBR.
Specifically, to make a primary partition active, set the byte (exclusive) at 1BE or 1CE or 1DE or 1EE to 80H. This is the first byte in the partition record for each entry in the partition table.
Best
After thinking about it, i guess it does copy the partition entry, because when i ghost it knows what the file system type is.
I'M WRONG.
