I installed XP on an 80GB HDD with 2 partitions. Many months later I got a great deal on another 80GB drive, and I installed it as a slave drive. Periodically I use ghost to image from one drive to another so I always have a current backup. Now I noticed that XP's disk management shows the primary partition of the first disk as active and the first partition of the second disk as the system partition. This prevents me from moving the drive letters around. I unplugged the second drive (it is a backup anyway) and the system runs but it does not list a drive letter in disk management)

I'd like to fix this as I really do not know what the long term effects are of running XP like this. If it helps, I'm on SP2 and it is a basic, not dynamic disk.

Thanks.

Hi ryoko,
Is it not as simple as right clicking your 'blank' partition/disk and clicking 'Change drive letters and paths'?
If I do this on my primary (none active) partition I can quite happily change the letter.
Maybe it is the case that you do not have a label for the volume? My 'drive C' didnt have a label until recently - and thats only because an application made me type one in. This was just a matter of right clicking the drive ->
properties then typing a new label in the blank field.

Where I am looking at currently is:

In control panel -> Adminsitrive tools -> computer management

Then: storage ->disk management

Hopefully you can mount a drive in here.

You can use a program called Disk Commander to name, format, resize, or copy partitions.

I wish it were that easy. Unfortunately the system partition does not seem to be changeable. I'm not sure what made it switch from the main drive to the new one, but somehow that is what happened.

As far as Disk commander, does it have the ability to just set the system partition without doing anything destructive? The disk that I want to use as the system partition has a valid copy of ntldr, boot.ini, ntdetect, etc.

-Ry

Would 'fixboot' do the trick in the xp recovery console? Also the 'map' command looks quite useful.

MS do say that fixboot and fixmbr could knacker the drives so maybe some extra research is needed here.

Heres a handy page with some useful commands:

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/r_c_cmds.htm

Well, I made a new ghost of my system, then with only one drive plugged in, I ran the RC's fixboot. No luck. Then I ran the fix mbr. Again no luck.

Basically If I open up the disk management, it shows the drive, and the first partition is shown as active. It should also show as system.

Now right clicking on that partition and choosing change drive letter+ paths brings up a box that should show it as "C". The second partition should also show up as "D". There is nothing listed when I go in here. The OS does recognize these as C+D drive letters. Granted I can change the drive letters around, but it still will not show the drive letter in that app.

Right now the PC runs fine, however I'm afraid down the road I will have further problems. That is why I'd like this fixed. Any ideas would be great. I really want to avoid another OS reinstall.

-Ry