Re: I'm trying to configure boot.ini in a basic HDD Upgrade. Any help is Appreciated

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

From: tmt (john_toliver_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 01/23/05


Date: 23 Jan 2005 14:28:14 -0800

My HDD is a 20GB partitioned 4 different ways:
FAT32 I: 3GB - This is where I keep my installation files
NTFS J: 7GB - This is what XP boots off of and where I keep
everything.
NTFS K: 8GB - This is basically a mirror via ghost 2002 partition copy
of "j:\"
FAT32 L: 1.5GB - This was used for storing emails and documents in case
XP suffered a crash that I could not recover from. at one time but then
I no longer needed it. It saved my files I wanted and emails and some
music etc.

The fat32 drives were done deliberately so that I could access them
from dos in a crunch. Incidentally this was an upgrade from 2000
Professional.

I wish to ghost my J: Drive to the new partition and make the OS "see"
the new space it will have. I can do a simple file copy of everything
else. I want the two drive to be able to reside together so that I can
continue ghosting to the old drive.

I tried accomplishing this by using ghost 2002 to ghost "j:\" to my new
drive and play with the boot.ini settings to make it see the new drive.
This did not work even after I made the disk active in fdisk from DOS.
It would get to the screen I described last time and then stop
loading. I still had use of my mouse and their was no HDD activity
indicating it was doing something for which I should wait.

My next hypothesis is that I have to change my path statements and any
other environment variables that point to old "j:\" to "c:\". I would
like to try this manually. The way in windows is to right click on my
computer ->properties->advanced-> "Environment variables and change
everything that makes a reference to "j:\" to "C:\". I'm thinking it
stops loading now either becasue the OS can't find a file(s) it needs
and won't check elsewhere, or this is one of those annoying security /
anti pirating techniques XP has.

At anyrate, if my assumption is at least in the ball park for the
environment variable hypothesis, then I would like to know the names of
the files that hold this information so I can edit them manually from
DOS.

Any thoughts you have would be appreciated.



Relevant Pages

  • Re: Somebody help! - start up issues and hard drive partitions!
    ... System Recovery requires the FAT32 file system. ... I have discovered that the partition structure is a feature of Acer ... In reality this is far too much for today's drives and 700 mb is ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: Help! Hidden partition taking up half my hard drive space!
    ... Dell approach of including Ghost with the system and using most ... of my drives. ... It has a utility for changing partition information. ... Of course, I already have a Windows install CD, and a backup of all ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage)
  • Re: Installing new boot drive in laptop. Help please? RESOLVED
    ... My own copy of Ghost is version 8 instead 10. ... even if the two hard drives are not of the same size. ... proportionally to the previous installation) and make sure that the MBR ... Of course, you can make the partition yourself but if you make an error, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: Installing new boot drive in laptop. Help please? RESOLVED
    ... I didn't see an option Ghost 10 to handle the disk copy the way you were ... even if the two hard drives are not of the same size. ... Of course, you can make the partition yourself but if you make an error, ... to make it active and copy the MBR. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: How to make a cloned disk boot?
    ... Ghost 2003 program (and we've probably used it more than a thousand times ... process using either a Ghost bootable floppy disk or bootable CD. ... versions onto the first partition of a disk on a PC. ... Anyway, my experience has always been with IDE connected drives, never ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)