I need someone's help in removing a dual boot situation on my Dad's PC. I originally assembled the PC with the normal one hard drive with Win 98SE (C)on it. Later I decided to upgrade to Win XP Pro. Instead of burning our bridges, I installed a second hard drive (D) and installed Win XP Pro on it. This way he could fall back to C drive and boot to Win98SE if necessary. After a few months he's now using XP Pro allways, we have no need to boot into Win98. My question is how do I replace both drives with just a single new one. I want to keep the data on D drive (win XP) and discard the original C drive altogether and make the new larger drive the C drive with Windows XP pro on it. I have made images of both drives to external USB hard drives as backups. I know I can't just remove the C drive because that's where the boot records reside. The question is how do I remove the C drive and use the existing D drive as my normal boot drive? Sorry if this sounds confusing!

Remove the first drive and set the 2nd in the place of the first. Boot the xp cd and get into install. Choose repair. This will reinstall XP but keep all your apps/data. This should fix the boot and registry. You will have to do all your XP updates again.

I beleive if you remove the C:98 drive, then boot to the XP CD, use the Recovery Console and use the fixmbr command, this will write a new master boot record to the D:xp drive. As far as changing the D drive to C, you may be able to get away with it using a 3rd party disk partitioning program, but I don't recommend trying this. XP will run fine as the D:drive. L L