Re: Getting rid of dual boot setup?

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

From: Timothy Daniels (TDaniels_at_NoSpamDot.com)
Date: 12/19/04 

Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 00:21:29 -0800

"Pegasus (MVP)" wrote:
>
> "Timothy Daniels" wrote:
>> "Pegasus (MVP)" wrote:
>> > "Timothy Daniels" wrote:
>> >> "Pegasus (MVP)" wrote:
>> >> > As Buck suggests: Win if WinXP saw the light of the day on
>> >> > drive D: then it has to end its life on drive D:. Moving it to
>> >> > drive C: will end up in a disaster.
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> In my nefarious cloning of WinXP to create backups and
>> >> clean systems for (non-commercial!) software development
>> >> and testing, I regularly clone WinXP systems from partition 1
>> >> on one hard drive to any of four primary partitions on another
>> >> hard drive. The clones are exact copies of the original, but
>> >> they start up in partition X just fine, and they always call their
>> >> own partition "Local Disk (C:)". Never have I had a problem
>> >> with a clone complaining that it was *supposed* to be in
>> >> partition 1. Shortcuts and everything else I normally use work
>> >> just fine - even IIS and SQL Server. What am I doing wrong? :-)
>> >>
>> >
>> > In my reply I said "Drive"; I never said "Partition". You can
>> > move a Windows installation freely from one partition to
>> > another, provided that the partition number is reflected in
>> > c:\boot.ini. However, as Buck Rogers mentioned, the registry
>> > is full of references to the drive letter where Windows was
>> > originally installed. If Windows was installed on drive D: then
>> > it must always run on drive D:. If you have a step-by-step
>> > recipe to transplant it to drive C: then I would love to hear
>> > about it.
>> >
>> > One way of achieving this might be to edit the registry off-line
>> > and to change the appropriate drive letter in this key:
>> > HKLM/SYSTEM/MountedDevices. I have never tried this,
>> > hence I do not know how it works.
>>
>>
>> I assumed that you meant "partition" since WinXP names
>> other partitions "Local Disks". But since you meant hard
>> drive, then my reply is that moving WinXP from drive to drive
>> is a piece of cake - I do it regularly and frequently with the
>> use of a 3rd party cloning utility called "Drive Image". When
>> I bought Drive Image 7, it was a product by PowerQuest.
>> With the buyout of PowerQuest by Symantec, it's now called
>> "Ghost 9.0". And, as I mentioned above, the clones boot up
>> quite nicely and function quite well (as a matter of fact, they
>> function *identically* to the original). The procedure is to install
>> Ghost 9.0 (né Drive Image) along with MS .NET Framework,
>> and then start up Drive Image. In the dialog box, tell it to copy
>> a hard drive and tell it the source drive and the destination drive.
>> For the destination, you can tell it to put the copy into "unallocated
>> space", and it will put the copied info into unformatted space
>> on the destianation drive. Also tell Drive Image to mark the
>> destination partition "active" if you want it its copy of ntldr and
>> boot.ini files to be used in the boot process, and to copy over
>> the Master Boot Record ("MBR") if the destination hard drive
>> doesn't have one already. Then tell Drive Image to Start.
>>
>> After the copying is complete (about 4GB/min), shut down
>> the computer and use one of the optional ways of starting up the
>> clone for the 1st time in isolation from the original. The simplest
>> way is to just disconnect the original HD. That puts the clone HD
>> at the head of the boot sequence (if there were only 2 HDs), and
>> it makes the original invisible. Another way is to take the trouble
>> to substitute the clone HD in place of the original HD and
>> change the jumpers so the clone HD is Master (not really needed).
>> Another way, which *I* do, since I've put the HDs' power on
>> toggle switches, is to merely throw the switch for the original
>> HD's power to OFF. (Be sure the PC is shut down when you
>> throw the switch OFF or ON, though.)
>>
>> With the original WinXP thus invisible to the clone WinXP,
>> the clone can be started up without it forming links to system files
>> in the original OS which would make it permanently dependent
>> on the presence of the original OS to function. Once the clone
>> WinXP has been successfully started without its "parent" visible,
>> it becomes an independent "adult" OS, and it can thereafter be
>> started up with its "parent" OS visible to it without any problems.
>>
>> You can even put multiple clones on another HD as I do to
>> make quickly restorable (i.e. bootable) milestone copies of your
>> WinXP OS. Since a bootable OS must reside on a primary
>> partition, you can put up to 4 bootable copies on a HD, and
>> you can load any one of them using the boot menu taken from
>> the boot.ini file of whichever partition is marked "active" on the
>> HD which is at the head of the BIOS's boot sequence.
>>
>> I should add that each clone that loads calls its file system root
>> "C:", and it renames all the other partitions "D:", "E:", "F:", etc.,
>> so you have to check with Disk Management to be sure you have
>> the entries in the boot.ini file referring to the right partitions. It
> helps
>> to identify the clone that is loaded by having a distinctive back-
>> ground for the Desktop on each clone or having a folder with a
>> name which reflects the "birthdate" of the clone.
>>
>> By following these procedures, you can have many clones on
>> many hard drives, and by manipulating the boot sequence (to
>> select the HD) and by setting the "active" flag (to select the
>> boot.ini file), and by setting the parameters in the boot.ini file
>> (to select the partition to load from), you can select whichever
>> clone to run that you want.
>>
>> As for partition naming, my observation has been that
>> physical hard drives are named "Disk 0", "Disk 1", "Disk 2",
>> etc. by Disk Management, and partitions are named
>> "Local Drive(C:)", "Local Drive(D:)", "Local Drive(E:)" which
>> correspond with the letters naming the root of the file system
>> in each partition. Since (in my observation) the running OS
>> always calls itself "C:", all path references to files within the
>> system's partition always begin with "C:" and are always correct.
>> If a path were to begin with a reference to another partition,
>> however, the name of the root might be "D:" when the partition
>> meant had been renamed "E:" by the running OS. The solution
>> to that might be to use Disk Management to change the name
>> of the partition (such as a data partition) that is usualy pathed
>> as "D:" to be called "D:". Thus all shortcuts referring to files
>> in that data partition would remain correct. Whether this explicit
>> naming would persist from load to load, though, I don't know.
>> If not, right there is an argument for putting everything in one
>> big partition. :-)
>>
>> *TimDaniels*
>>
>
> The aim of the OP was to move his WinXP installation to a
> different drive letter, i.e. from D: to C:. Your reply deals with
> moving it to a different disk.
>
> Moving WinXP installations from one disk to another is indeed
> a piece of cake, provided that you maintain the ***same drive
> letter***. If you change the drive letter then you are in trouble.
>
> To prove it to my own satisfaction, I ran this experiment a
> moment ago:
> - Install Win2000 on drive D:.
> - Use an imaging program to copy the installation to drive C:
> on a new disk.
> - Fix up c:\boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetec.com and the boot sector.
> - Boot the machine with only the new disk in place.
>
> The result was as expected: Prior to the transfer, the registry
> contained more than 3,000 references to drive D:. After the
> transfer, these references were still in place, and Win2000
> would not work properly.
>
> Now if you disagree with my findings, please try to do
> what the OP tried to do: Move an existing installation
> from drive D: to drive C:. Here is the acid test that
> confirms that you have indeed done it:
> 1. Start a Command Prompt
> 2. Type this: set systemroot
> 3. Make a note of the response.
>
> With your original installation, the response will be D:\Windows,
> or E:\Windows.
>
> After the transfer, the response must be C:\Windows.
>
> With the tests that you ran, the response was C:\Windows
> in all cases. You never changed the drive letter!

    I was responding to your comment in which you wrote:
"In my reply I said "Drive"; never said "Partition".

Partitions, at least partitions containing bootable OSes,
are called "Local Disks" and named "Local Disk(C:)",
"Local Disk(D:)", etc. by WinXP's Disk Management
utitlity. Physical hard drives are caled "Disks" and named
"Disk 0", "Disk 1", etc. by the same WinXP utitlity. Now,
with that in mind, please explain what you mean by
"moving WinXP from drive D: to drive C:"? To my mind,
that means moving the WinXP system from the 2nd partition
to the 1st partition, or if the partitions are arranged differently,
moving WinXP from whatever partition contained the WinXP
having a file root called "D:" to a partition which previously
had a file structure starting at a root called "C:". If the
resulting WinXP refers to itself as "Local Disk(D:)" and it
calls its file root "D:", what's the problem? Do you or the
OP want to move it to a new partition *and* rename it?
If so, why? I suspect the OP just wanted to move the
partition containing WinXP down to where the deleted
partition had been, and Partition Magic will do that quite
simply.

*TimDaniels*

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