andrewducker: (Default)
[personal profile] andrewducker
I have two hard drives. They both have installs of Windows XP on. I choose which one I boot to when I start up. Which is fine.

Except that the primary drive is about an inch from death. And if I take it out then the secondary drive doesn't boot at all - presumably because the boot record is on the primary drive.

A quick google indicates that I should boot to a recovery console and fun "fixboot" - however, when booting off the secondary drive, the drive with everything on it is labelled "I:" - if I fix the boot record, is this likely to stay the same, or will it suddenly be the C drive?

I'd like to have some idea of what I'm in for before I destroy my machine...

Date: 2008-01-13 05:53 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] call-waiting.livejournal.com
I would imagine that, regardless of whether or not it relabels the drive as 'C:', it would render it bootable. Windows is capable of running with a system disk label other than 'C:'. For years, I had a Windows 2000 install that had the system disk labelled as G, and it was the most stable Windows install I ever had (although I suspect this is unrelated to the fact that its system disk was G).

Date: 2008-01-13 06:01 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] call-waiting.livejournal.com
No, it should be fine. I should have said that not only was G: the system disk, it was also the only disk. It was one of my early Win2000 installs, so I started with a system dual-booting 98 and 2000, and eventually got rid of the Win98 drive. The Win2000 install continued referring to itself as G:.

Date: 2008-01-13 08:03 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] vereybowring.livejournal.com
Just back up anything essential.
One thing to try is to change the boot record in msconfig to remove the faulty windows first then try to fixboot, although I must say it might completely rewrite the boot record and you lose all your data.
Microsoft is not very friendly to failing hard drives.

Disc magic

Date: 2008-01-14 06:39 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] alpha-c3ntaur.livejournal.com
If any of your progams stop working you can use diskmagic to change the partition back to I: You can also do it through windows, only I'm not sure if you can do it with your windows based partition. However I don't think that your drive letter will change in the first place.

Backup first though
Remember its Windows
Backup

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